A Better Experience - Software Development Times On The Web

A Better Experience
AJAX-enabled apps are springing up on intranets as businesses look to leverage the technologies
By Darryl K. Taft

February 15, 2007 — Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) has not only helped revolutionize the look of Web applications, but also enhanced the usability of such applications, experts say.

As proof of the improvements in usability brought on by AJAX-influenced Web sites, usability guru Jakob Nielsen, a principal at the San Francisco-based Nielsen Norman Group, recently announced the winners of his company’s seventh annual intranet design contest, and AJAX played a role in making the sites more usable, he said.

According to Nielsen, as opposed to previous years, intranet design teams this year applied such new Internet technologies as social networking and wikis in “restrained ways” that emphasized useful information. The result was the addition of sophisticated intranet features that expressed each company’s culture and served the needs of individual employees better than ever before, he said.

“This year, our intranet contest winners used the same trendy technologies, but they aimed instead for utility and pragmatism, and achieved them without any sacrifice to the coolness factor associated, for example, with an AJAX map that helps an employee find another employee with whom to carpool,” Nielsen said in a statement.

Moreover, AJAX is “definitely catching on,” Nielsen said in an interview. “Intranets are embracing it, although you have some overhyped cases.”

Yet, the usability benefits are best implemented as “modest things like updating a small part of the screen when the user does a query,” or updating stock quotes, Nielsen said.

AJAX enables developers to build Web applications that can refresh a screen with new data without requiring numerous trips to the server, which makes for a more interactive and smooth experience.

Essentially, AJAX transforms static HTML pages into rich and responsive Web applications. Jouk Pleiter, CEO of Backbase, said with AJAX, there is a real paradigm shift, where you move presentation logic from the server to the client, creating a powerful client-side presentation platform that enables applications that offer a real-time, interactive user experience. This paradigm shift eliminates the need for multiple roundtrips to the server and enables applications to start using client-side CPU power to directly interact with the end user, he explained.

However, for usability’s sake, said Nielsen, the design of AJAX-based applications should involve its use for only supplementary material to be added to a Web page.

“Otherwise [the page refreshing] would be interfering too much with Web navigation,” he said.

Still, the rapid pace of AJAX adoption in the enterprise is due to the fact it “creates a more smooth user experience,” whereas “going page by page is a more abrupt or fragmented experience,” Nielsen said.

According to the Norman Nielsen Group, the 10 organizations with winning intranets, in alphabetical order, are: American Electric Power, Comcast, DaimlerChrysler, The Dow Chemical Co., Infosys Technologies, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, National Geographic Society, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Volvo Group.

SOME DOWNSIDES
Yet, with all the positive elements of AJAX, it also has its potential downsides. For example, “we’ve always had pop-ups that people detest, but [with AJAX] the same techniques could be used for spam or obnoxious advertising,” Nielsen said.

“Like many technologies, AJAX is a form of TNT: It can solve problems or it can be made into a destructive force,” said Tony Fernandes, CEO of theUEgroup, a San Jose-based user interface design and usability firm. “It all depends on the software developer’s ability to use the technology effectively. Too many companies put the focus on taking a technological approach, like AJAX, and focusing on what their app can now do, not what it should do. Another way of putting it is that AJAX doesn’t inherently change much if companies aren’t willing to put the work into making their user interfaces usable for their customers. This heads Web pages toward the realm of standalone software applications.”

Another downside is that AJAX programming can be complex.

Moreover, Sean Carton, chief strategy officer at idfive, a Baltimore-based Web development and design firm, said while social computing is hot now, the trend may not last.

“Doing collaboration requires that people know how to work together—a skill that has nothing to do with the state of technology,” Carton said. “And while many more forward-thinking companies have sparked a lot of creativity by having open systems and APIs that allow people to borrow or hack bits of functionality for their own ends, it may only be a matter of time before some bean-counter makes the case that people should have to pay to have access to all that nifty stuff, halting a lot of the development that’s led to so much creativity now.”

WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
According to the Nielsen report, nearly all of the winning intranets offered extensive personalization features to streamline information delivery and present the right material to the right person’s intranet desktop at the right time.

Driving Nielsen’s point home, theUEgroup’s Fernandes said his company is using AJAX “on some new ways of organizing content on the page to allow new levels of personalization and allowing new levels of dynamic content presentation to reduce the amount of page navigation needed: bringing the information to the user rather than forcing them to navigate to it.”

idfive’s Carton said, “We’re building AJAX applications into most of the new sites we’re working on. We’re using it to create more fluid experiences that react in the way people are used to applications reacting.” Carton is the former dean of the School of Design and Media at Philadelphia University.

The underlying technology for AJAX—JavaScript, XML, HTML and CSS—has been around for years. However, “what’s new is the growing consensus that Web application user experiences can and should be improved, and an umbrella term for the collection of techniques that Web developers can use to incrementally improve Web applications,” said Jeff Whatcott, senior director of product marketing at Adobe Systems.

“Users need more interactive, intuitive and much faster, more responsive Web applications that behave like the ones they know from their desktop world,” said Hans-Dirk Walter, CEO of Canoo Engineering, based in Basel, Switzerland. “That’s probably the most important effect of AJAX.

And AJAX, as one part of the rich Internet application story, allows for building such kind of highly interactive Web applications.”

Scott Dietzen, president and chief technology officer of San Mateo, Calif.-based Zimbra, which has as its foundation a series of open-source AJAX-based applications, said, “While the technology for object-oriented, rich client applications has been around for years, we have never had the universal platform of the World Wide Web for delivery.”

Up until now, such functionality has depended upon end users’ having to download, install, manage and maintain a specific application they know little about. AJAX, on the other hand, has the Web’s look-and-feel and deployment model—also known as software as a service, so it feels natural to users, Dietzen said.

APPEAL OF INDEPENDENCE
Moreover, what sets AJAX apart is that the collection of technologies that make up AJAX are not controlled by any single vendor and can deliver a true open client that brings a service-oriented architecture (SOA) programming model to the B-to-C side of the equation.

This is very appealing both to vendors providing AJAX tools and to businesses, and will play a key role in future adoption of the technology, said Rod Smith, CTO of emerging technologies for IBM Software Group.

For instance, participants in the OpenAjax consortium are collaborating on how their toolkits implement the de facto AJAX standard technologies and widget compatibility to enable developers to mix and match components, and make AJAX more approachable for Web designers and others, Smith said.

“Developers at times ask, ‘What AJAX library should I use?’” said Kevin Hakman, director of product marketing for TIBCO Software’s General Interface. “Just as there is a robust ecosystem of solutions, frameworks, tools, etc., … within the idea of Java, in 2007 we’ll see the same emerge for AJAX,” he said. “Further, the OpenAjax Alliance, now with about 100 member organizations, is advancing the common AJAX underpinnings to enable that ecosystem to flourish and accelerate.”

Adobe’s Whatcott said AJAX is raising users’ baseline expectations for the usability and responsiveness of Web applications, and that puts pressure on developers, designers and architects to collaborate more closely.

A WORK IN PROGRESS
Meanwhile, AJAX still has some obstacles to overcome.

“There is much more work to be done,” Zimbra’s Dietzen said. “Ease of development and debugging are the two biggest barriers to making AJAX more mainstream. While using an AJAX toolkit is essential to success, there are currently too many of them in the open-source camp, so some inevitable consolidation around a smaller number of long-term winners needs to happen. Better tooling and easier coexistence for multiple toolkits within a page [which provides for easier integration] will also be key.”

Christian Stettler, a senior engineer at Canoo, said integrated development environment support and AJAX testing tools are still in their early stages, “which influences the development time and the efforts for testing and quality assurance.”

And there is another trap into which developers might fall, said Stettler.

“There is a much higher degree of freedom with regard to the design of the user interface in AJAX-enabled Web applications than in traditional desktop applications,” he said. “For desktop applications, the look-and-feel is mainly defined by the concepts and paradigms provided by the operating system, [so] applications look and behave consistently. There is nothing comparable for AJAX applications. As long as there is no standard AJAX UI paradigm, developers must take care to build intuitive user interfaces,” Stettler said.

“It’s no fun to madly click around in the Web browser to search for a certain function because the developer has hidden the appropriate menu component somewhere on the page,” he said.

Some AJAX toolkit and framework companies take the approach of creating an AJAX layer that runs in any browser and transforms the browser into an interactive user experience environment. This approach is very similar to the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in Windows Vista, but differs in that the majority of AJAX solutions are built around open W3C standards and run in any browser.

However, Microsoft group product manager Keith Smith said Redmond is committed to delivering the tools and platform—from Visual Studio, Expression Studio, ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX and WPF to Internet Explorer and Internet Information Services—that enable Web developers of all levels to build great Web sites with advanced functionality and a superior user experience.

For example, a developer could start with an ASP.NET AJAX site that delivers standards-based content that works across all modern browsers using XHTML, CSS and JavaScript, Smith said. “You could then drop in some Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere [final release by midyear] magic that renders vector graphics and video using declarative XAML [Extensible Application Markup Language] markup and control all aspects of the experience—client/server communication, UI, animation and video—using standard client-side JavaScript,” he said.

Meanwhile, said Canoo’s Walter, “AJAX as we know it today is not the only technological option, and it is not the end of the road but its beginning. We will see that programming models known from the desktop application world, such as clear separation between model and view, event-based programming and multitasking, will find their way into traditional Web applications.”

SOME BENEFITS
Most observers see AJAX as a benefit to users.

Joel Spolsky, founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software and author of the popular “Joel on Software” blog, said, “As I see it, moving applications from the desktop to the Web was, in one important way, a big step backward for usability…back to the world of CICS mainframe applications, where the only two user-interface features were: fill out a form, and hit ‘Send’ and get a new form back a few seconds later.”

Indeed, AJAX “gave developers a half-decent interaction model on the Web,” said

Dion Almaer, co-founder of AJAXian.com. “This got rid of the form submit, link, click equals full page refresh mentality, and suddenly Web developers could do almost as much as desktop folk.”

Best of all, AJAX means instantaneous feedback, Spolsky said. It also means a vastly better level of control, he added. “It’s the difference between riding a horse, where you can give general instructions that the horse might respond to a few seconds later, and driving a sports car, where your every move is translated instantly into action,” he said.

For that reason, many developers are trying to use AJAX in every Web application, for every application aspect and context possible. Over time as some of the various AJAX libraries disappear, others will grow larger and start covering more aspects of the Web application. This begins with JavaScript helper utilities, passes on to UI effect libraries and leads to remoting or proxying frameworks, Stettler said.

“This is approximately where AJAX stands now, a suitable solution for smaller applications that reaches a lot of Internet users without requiring special software on the PC,” he said.

For its part, Adobe is working on its Apollo runtime, which will give AJAX applications the ability to run as desktop applications and to work offline with cached data sets. “This will be a big step forward for AJAX development,” Whatcott said.

John Crupi, CTO at JackBe, in Chevy Chase, Md., said AJAX is but a means to a solutions end. “We…believe that AJAX plus SOA plus mashups is the killer enterprise Web 2.0 application.”

BACK TO THE FRONT END
For the past 10 years, much of the IT investment and innovation has been in the back end, in application servers, Java/JSP technology, ESB, BPEL, etc., Crupi said.

The front end, specifically the Web browser, has really just functioned as a semi-smart “dumb terminal” to display whatever the back end served. But now, the pendulum is swinging back to the client or front end.

“It feels like all the economic, social and technology moons are aligning, and we’re getting ready for the next big bang,” Crupi said. “But, what’s really happening is we now have the opportunity to take advantage of the Web browsers [and] new AJAX capability, and [can] begin treating the browser as a lightweight application container. And thankfully the billions of dollars we’ve spent in back-end integration has finally paid off and gotten us closer to consuming SOA functionality [with] direction from AJAX applications.”

Moreover, Crupi said the core opportunities for AJAX and Web 2.0 in the enterprise are found in three primary areas: Web applications as a desktop application replacement, dynamic desktops as a portal killer, and embeddable Web applications as a way to enable partner-to-partner integration using mashups.

MEETING CUSTOMER NEEDS
AJAX also enables enterprises to create rich online self-service applications.

As more consumers and businesses turn to the Internet not just for information, but as a way to run their daily errands, the need for more sophisticated online customer service grows. So many enterprises have to make online self-service technologies a priority to meet customers’ service needs more effectively and dramatically reduce service costs at the same time.

AJAX can also help to modernize heavy desktop applications and move them to the Web.

AJAX can be adopted incrementally, IBM’s Smith said. “Bottom line, what attracts businesses to AJAX is the fact the browser experience has a lot to be desired. And businesses are recognizing that an improved user experience means more potential revenue opportunity.”

Adobe’s Whatcott agreed. “Developers are mostly using AJAX to incrementally improve existing Web applications, removing a page refresh here and there,” he said. “This can offer great bang for the buck. Large-scale greenfield development of ambitious apps using AJAX appears to be much more challenging. It’s like there is an invisible point of negative returns in terms of lines of code where things get so complex that it just becomes unmanageable for mere mortals.”

“Many developers are using AJAX in very subtle ways to improve the user experience, without the user really even knowing that they are using AJAX,” AJAXian.com’s Almaer said. “That is fantastic.”

Meanwhile, more recently, several mobile device manufacturers have begun shipping desktop browsers—typically Safari-based or Opera—with their higher-end mobile devices, with user interface approaches for dealing with small screen issues, said Jon Ferraiolo, a Web architect in the IBM Software Group emerging technologies unit.

As a result, one of the key new required features on mobile phones is a desktop-capable, AJAX-capable Web browser, Ferraiolo said. “The long-term effect is that AJAX support will quickly slide from high-end into midrange cell phones, and not far into the future, become a standard feature on all cell phones. From an IT manager or Web developer perspective, this means that they can develop Web applications within their existing HTML-centric infrastructure and have them work on both desktop PCs and mobile devices.”

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