In this InfoQ interview, recoreded at Javapolis, Ajaxian cofounder Dion Almaer talks about the state of Ajax development today. Among the items he discusses are the history of how Ajax came to be, which frameworks he recommends developers consider, and tooling/debuggins support. Almaer also talks about security and general design considerations that need to be respected when creating Ajax enabled applications.
Watch Ajaxian.com's Dion Almaer interview (30:39 min)
Watch Ajaxian.com's Dion Almaer interview (30:39 min)
I think what's cool about Ajax is that we totally change our web architectures. So now we think about Web 1.0 (although I think it's hilarious to put a version number to the web which changes every second), in the traditional web we have very, very, simple request responses, that were very very course grained pages loaded all the time. And that's great for doing HTTP and for retrieving the documents, which is of course what HTTP was invented for, what the web kind of came about for, but the problem is you can't build rich web applications that way. If you were building a swing, GUI or WinForm application and every time you change the little widget it redrew all the others widgets on the screen you would think that was a crazy architecture, but that's all we had to go with on the Web 1.0. So with Web 2.0, and using Ajax specifically within it, we get around that problem, we don't have to go back to the server and download the entire UI for every little thing that we do, we can make these asynchronous requests back to the server, get something back and then maybe tweak a little piece that's going on within our application and that totally changes the way in which we can build these apps, we can do a lot more rich user interfaces... and this is where Ajax is kind of revolutionizing the web.Dion Almaer is the co-founder of Ajaxian.com where he blogs on Ajax topics daily. Previously, Dion worked with me at TheServerSide.com as Java editor.