This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Guy Naor. Original Post: To AJAX Or Not To AJAX That Is The Question Feed Title: Famundo - The Dev Blog Feed URL: http://devblog.famundo.com/xml/rss/feed.xml Feed Description: A blog describing the development and related technologies involved in creating famundo.com - a family management sytem written using Ruby On Rails and postgres Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Guy Naor Latest Posts From Famundo - The Dev Blog

I'm sure this would have been Hamlet's question has he been with us today working as a web developer.

This subject was beaten to death already, but just a few days ago I was presented with just that decision, and it made it really clear in my mind. In my case the decision was simple, but I know it's not always the case. So having reference points might help others.

While developing the help system for Famundo that I mentioned yesterday, the admin part was developed with Ajax Scaffold and is very very nice and useable. When I did the public face of the help system, I continued with a full Ajax solution. The table of content, the internal linking and the tagging mechanism, all updated the main view using Ajax.

It was cool, it was nice, but it was a disaster as far as useability goes. You can't go forward and backward betweeb pages you've read and it makes navigation a nightmare for the user. It took me a few minutes of really trying to use it to figure this part really doesn't work well with Ajax. So instead of that I made everything into regular links, added VERY aggressive caching and it's much better now. The only thing I left with Ajax is the search which makes sense to do this way.

My conclusion from that is that if navigation is a central part of the functionality - don't do Ajax. Just use standard and expected navigation. It's more intutive and easier to use.

For editng/updating heavy interfaces, Ajax makes a lot of sense.