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AJAX Is No Panacea


By Allen Holub
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March 1, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Every so often the industry is overcome with a collective madness so pervasive that the sane among us are forced to check ourselves into the asylum. The current embodiment of this principle is AJAX, a technology that all of us will be using sooner rather than later, but a flawed technology nonetheless. AJAX solves a problem that Java solved six years ago, but the Java solution was firmly rejected by the industry. I’m speaking of applets. The fact that an applet-based solution to the rich Web client problem wasn’t viable is fully Sun’s fault, but nonetheless, AJAX is really a triumph of politics over thinking.

Since its adoption is inevitable, I’ll be looking at various AJAX tools and initiatives on and off for the next few months, but first I want to whine.

The first thing to bear in mind is that AJAX equals JavaScript. An AJAX toolkit is nothing but a massive JavaScript implementation of features that should have been built into the browser. AJAX carries with it all of the massive headaches associated with any language that actively promotes bad program structure. The toolkits are huge blobs of unmaintainable gobbledygook that only the author can understand.

In theory we can just use the toolkit without worrying about the implementation. In practice, the inherent bugginess of all JavaScript programs (and lack of documentation for most of them) forces us to deal with the code. Some of the toolkits are so delicate that you will be loathe to touch them. Moreover, vast amounts of this complexity are centered on just getting the toolkit to work across browsers—a problem that Java solves elegantly.

Perhaps the various AJAX initiatives like the recently announced Open AJAX will eventually create something useful—essentially burying JavaScript inside a widget library—but for now the learning curve is steep indeed. Frankly, the real solution is to just fix the @#@&*%! browsers. Build in a real language that’s implemented the same way in every browser, which has a well-thought-out interface toolkit as part of the language. I’m not sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for that to happen, so AJAX is what’s left.




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