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AJAX remains a top RIA platform, preferred for stability


By Jeff Feinman
December 29, 2008 — 
Rich Internet applications today range from the merely cool to the truly valuable, such as an intranet portal that lets U.S. fighter pilots deployed on missions around the globe keep in touch with their loved ones. When Chicago-based developer Roundarch was building that application, it picked AJAX as the project’s underpinning.

Dave Meeker, user experience strategy lead for Roundarch, said AJAX was the clear choice for the task. Its generic HTML and CSS base, along with a compelling GUI, make AJAX a prime platform for government projects.

“AJAX is sort of our standard way to solve a problem unless we have the option to move [away from it],” Meeker said. “We’re limited a lot of times by where we have to deploy an application.”  

Meeker’s company has maintained the Air Force portal for the past seven years, creating RIAs that keep U.S. airmen connected, as well as tools used for Webmail, logistics, planning and data services. The portal offers a “secured instant messenger,” with planned video chatting capabilities, which can be an airman’s only form of communication with his or her family when deployed overseas. Meeker estimated the portal has 850,000 registered users and called it the “main hub” of all software tools used by the Air Force.

Developers said AJAX remains a viable and flourishing RIA development method, even with Adobe Flex, Microsoft’s Silverlight and Sun’s JavaFX jockeying for attention. AJAX lets developers leverage their familiarity with CSS, HTML and JavaScript. Many developers have said AJAX is easy to use and is a good choice when it comes to creating simple dynamic Web applications. Also, AJAX can run on any browser, whereas Flex and Silverlight might create a problem when trying to upload applications in countries that might not have the same bandwidth and speed as the United States or Europe.

“When you start looking at applications that have to run outside of the U.S. and Europe, and talk about things being deployed in Africa and southeast Asia, you just don’t have computers that are as fast,” said Meeker, whose company has also done RIA projects for Hershey’s, The History Channel and Motorola. “Running the Flash player with 96[MB] of memory is really a bad experience. You can get away with building AJAX applications that perform better on poor hardware.”

Peter Mezzina, a technical lead for EMC’s Powerlink development group, said AJAX is a suitable and accessible choice for a group of developers working on a collaborative project. Powerlink provides EMC customers with online technical support and resources. Mezzina’s group develops EMC’s customer support website and has created a portal where customers enter trouble tickets. The portal also provides search capabilities and other business functions.

When deciding on its RIA platform, the Powerlink group evaluated 12 products, including Flex, and considered familiarity with the programming model and performance, Mezzina said. The group decided on AJAX because it had done some work with the Dojo Toolkit, and that experience gave it “an easy entry point” into AJAX, he said.

The Dojo Toolkit is a JavaScript library that tries to make creating AJAX-based applications easier with prepackaged widgets and a packaging system to facilitate modular development. “We didn’t think we had to hire a lot of people and thought we could train people and get them up to speed quickly,” said Mezzina.

The group chose Backbase’s Enterprise AJAX framework because it puts AJAX in a Java wrapper. That gave Mezzina and the other developers a familiar model, since the product presents itself as a Java library. Mezzina said his team used tools for managing and developing Java code. He said the tools do not always apply directly to JavaScript, and as a result, the team is less productive with JavaScript than it is with Java. “We were using the Dojo Toolkit, and that allows you to touch the JavaScript, but we found that was taking people out of their comfort zone,” he said. “The results and time it took to develop was hard to predict.”

Heavy lifting required
In comparing AJAX with Flex, Silverlight and other RIA platforms, Mezzina said AJAX is more stable and thus presents fewer problems for clients. “That’s the thing with any of these technologies," he said. "It’s not so much that you have servers going down or things of that sort. It’s about the customer trying to access the site and finding something weird on their PC. We’ve had cases like that [with applications built with AJAX], but for the most part, they’ve been easy to fix.”

An AJAX developer has to do more “heavy lifting” of code to build applications that feel as rich as Flex apps, Meeker said. The reason for this is that Adobe has spent much time putting application patterns into the Flex component framework.

Meeker estimated a developer could populate a data grid in Flex in seven to 10 minutes, whereas the task might take a couple of days with AJAX. This is because Flex applications run inside the Flash player on the player's own runtime, as opposed to an AJAX application running in the browser and using the browser’s memory process.

Though AJAX applications are lighter than Flex apps, the latter can offer more powerful performance, Meeker said. “If I’m building an application with a dashboard where I need to be able to move data around and drill in and out, I like the idea of a Flex application. [But] I think AJAX suits itself perfectly for extending the Web as we know it and making it more like desktop software.”

While AJAX has been around significantly longer than Silverlight and other platforms, some developers say AJAX has taken a long time to mature because there hasn’t been one single body pushing it as there is for the Adobe and Microsoft platforms. Open-source projects and organizations such as the OpenAjax Alliance have advanced the technology, but it is still missing a singular entity to shape it in a consistent manner. According to Meeker, that lack of consistency has hindered enterprise adoption of AJAX.

“For enterprise clients, for us to go in and recommend an AJAX library or framework, sometimes it becomes worrisome. If something like [JavaScript library] script.aculo.us disappears in two years, then what does the team do?” Meeker said. “That may not seem like a big issue, but stockholders may get a little weary in terms of things that may not be supported in a couple of years.”

Mezzina pointed out that some companies have sought to simplify the code writing required for AJAX applications by packaging data transfer, so that data can move between the client and server after a Web page is pulled up. He called packaged data transfer a “bit of shorthand” that can make coding less complex.

Meeker said that while AJAX might not be ideal for creating complex Web applications, he sees a potential solution to that with Google’s Chrome Web browser for Windows, which was released in September.

One issue that Roundarch has seen with AJAX is where a user needs to be able to load up 5,000 rows of data for an application they want built. In some cases, Roundarch has had to ditch AJAX because it couldn’t handle the amount of data that was required, but a platform like Flex can do it really well. However, Mezzina said Chrome’s handling of JavaScript applications allows the creation of much more robust JavaScript applications by isolating the applications in the memory process.
 
“If [the browser] freaks out and breaks, then I can close it and it doesn’t affect anything else,” Meeker said. “AJAX is more exciting now because it’s more robust than it has been. I’m hoping the other browsers follow suit with how Google has approached handling of JavaScript processes.”


Related Search Term(s): AJAX, Flex, Java, RIA, Adobe, EMC, Google, Roundarch, Sun


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