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Re: Hybridizing Java... I think some more things should be considered here
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Posted: Jul 1, 2007 11:15 PM
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Mmmmmm....
For me, Mr. Eckel and many people replying his post were working on the basis of a notorious misconception about Ajax.
Ajax isn’t a well-defined product or technology, like Java. And it is very far of being a hack.
More than a technology or a product, Ajax is a social phenomenon. Although the XMLHttpRequest object is a key component, the word “Ajax” denominates a way of putting a group of technologies and standards to work together. It gives a great deal of freedom to designers and programmers, who can use and mix a lot of technologies and products to create the applications, and imagine and use their own creative ways for storing, processing and presenting the data to the users.
With Ajax, the software developers aren’t bound to the interests of a corporation. Rather than that, the corporations are compelled to support Ajax, if they don’t want to be thrown off the market. And this is a very, very important fact. Ajax wasn’t a standard created by a company and adopted by the people. In the technical jargon of the social disciplines, the asynchronous use of JavaScript and XML began spontaneously, say, no identifiable person or corporation made people to use it, and no single person or group controls its use. Ajax appeared just like the socio-cultural phenomenons appear; and because of that, it is likely to stay with us for a long, long time. (Apart from a software developer I’m an Anthropologist, so believe me, my opinions are well-backed by a good amount of social theory). Google and Yahoo wouldn’t have built the infrastructure of their now-famous Internet services in Ajax if the conditions weren’t favorable.
One important fact about RIAs isn’t considered: they aren’t intended to run solely on the user’s devices. I don’t know a single serious developer who creates mission-critical and complex RIAs that run entirely on the browser or the Flash Player. RIAs have a server part, and often this is their most important one. The heavy work is done in server-scripting technologies such as PHP, JSP or ASP; databases like MySQL, Firebird, Oracle or SQL Server; and many other technologies and products. Of course, this multi-layered execution increases the freedom of the developer. If something is hard or impossible to do at one level, it can be done in another one.
This independence can’t be easily wiped off. Java and Dot Net were advertised as, and effectively are, platforms capable of being the standard RIA platforms. But they don’t give developers the same degree of freedom as Ajax, and I think this is one of the main reasons of their failure to make it.
Flex / Flash Player can be used to provide end users possibilities of interaction never seen before on Internet apps. But Ajax will not disappear. For the future, I bet the Flex SWFs will be communicating with the server with HTTP requests like the Ajax applications of today. I don’t think people would massively embrace the Flex Data Services, because not all the Web servers run a Java Virtual Machine or plan to run one, and there is a really big amount on money already spent on many other server technologies.
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