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AJAX-Based Web 2.0 Ready for Takeoff


New research shows strong interest in rich Internet application development

By Alan Zeichick
September 14, 2007 — 
Nearly four out of five organizations that are doing Web development are using, or planning to use, Web 2.0 or rich Internet application technologies—and specifically, AJAX. That’s according to a study conducted in July by BZ Research.

BZ Research, like SD Times, is a part of BZ Media. This particular study had responses from 574 software development managers, 510 of whom said they were involved in Web development. For this story, the results were filtered to consider responses only from those 510 individuals.

When asked if they were using, or planning to use, AJAX-based Web 2.0 or RIA technologies, 78.5 percent said they were, 9.7 percent said they weren’t, and 11.8 percent did not know.

AJAX “allows us to move otherwise costly server-side processing down to the client; allows us to decouple UI and Backend; provides flexibility,” said one respondent, while another said that it offers “great client side experience for a complex Web mapping application, easy to create parallel processes that tie in code behind with client side code.”

One respondent, who supports a school district, wrote that AJAX offers “enhanced usability for a user-base of hundreds of thousands of children and teachers. (Every full-page refresh is a needless opportunity for them to become distracted.) Shift some of the rendering to client machines—there are way more of them than our servers!”

However, for most organizations, deployment is still off in the future. When asked about the status of the most advanced AJAX projects at their companies, only 29.5 percent said they had actually deployed a production system. Another 15.2 percent were developing production systems, 14.0 percent were building pilot systems, and 26.8 percent were still studying the technologies and issues.

As occurs so often with development platforms, there was a split between the Java world and the Microsoft world. The most popular application platform being used for AJAX (or being considered for future AJAX projects) was Java/Java EE, selected by 55.7 percent of respondents, followed by Microsoft ASP.NET/Atlas by 44.7 percent. Other popular platforms were PHP, at 25.9 percent, Adobe’s Flash, at 21.8 percent, and Ruby on Rails, at 12.1 percent.

The respondents were also asked: “Other than JavaScript and XML, which languages will you be using for AJAX-based development?” The most popular was Java, at 54.5 percent, followed by Microsoft’s C#, at 35.8 percent, PHP at 27.6 percent, Visual Basic/VB.NET at 24.3 percent, Flash/ActionScript at 19.7 percent, and VBScript at 13.7 percent. C/C++ and Ruby were tied at 11.5 percent.

Of course, not everyone is a fan of AJAX as the solution for developing rich Internet applications. “AJAX is too complex. Browsers are not a proper platform for RIA—on the contrary they are an obstacle and AJAX is supposed to be the way to circumvent around the obstacles of the browser. True RIA is a browser-free solution,” said one. Another offered a more practical concern: “Sometimes AJAX can introduce usability issues, since it ‘breaks’ the simplicity of the Web applications, so we are not going to use it on every project.”


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