[thelist] Which Free Opensource AJAX Framework is worth thetimeand effort?

[Jose Hurtado]

Christian,

I agree completely, it all comes back to making things better for the
customer and assembling a team that not only can deliver results, but who
actually cares about this.

This probably why more and more "human oriented" design or
interfaces<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/XHIGIntro/chapter_1_section_1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000894-TP6>is
becoming more and more a differentiator among products.  For example
Basecamp, the project site, is really nothing amazing, but the usability is
awesome, it is so simple to use, learn and just so incredibly useful, it is
a poster for AJAX done right. The same can be said of the iPod, it is just
done better all over, it is better than anything else out there, why?
Designed for people.

AJAX is now probably close to what Flash used to be, the fortunate thing is
that most of the early AJAX projects out there happened to be pretty good
from the user perspective.  With the explosion of the Web2 bubble however,
this is already changing... probably not for the better, but we'll see.

Best Regards,

Jose L. Hurtado
Web Designer / IT Professional
Toronto, Canada


On 8/24/06, Christian Heilmann <codepo8 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Chris,
> >
> > Of course you should know what you are doing "under the hood" of the
> > framework, but anything that makes life simple for the developer is
> worth
> > consideration.  The "shortcut" here is being more efficient, but every
> smart
> > developer should know what he is doing to avoid shooting himself on the
> > foot!
>
> Yes, but this is a very selfish attitude. In the end we produce
> products that people should use to make their life easier or fulfil a
> task they came to our sites for as quickly as possible with the least
> effort. When you do this, you will have happy visitors and you are in
> business. Technology is a means to an end for this. I have set up web
> sites where the only purpose was to connect people to a call centre as
> there was just no way to get them through a given process with a web
> interface - no matter how clever. You could cut down on the steps they
> had to take on the phone though.
>
> Right now Ajax is the bomb and there is a myth that every interface
> gets better and slicker with it. The fact is that you can make web
> sites with Ajax more annoying to use and far less accessible with some
> products that are called Ajax these days. It is bad enough that
> marketing people fall for this; we shouldn't advertise a blind belief
> in a technology on a developer list. Ajax is one thing: A connector
> between the frontend and the backend, so to say a proxy for requests.
> That is all. You still need to create a clear interface, think about
> the user journeys and goals and put it in a nice looking coat. Ajax
> frameworks cannot replace good interaction architects, information
> architecs and designers and yet a lot of out of the box solutions
> promise that. I don't want a drag and drop interface for everything,
> and I don't want to have to learn a backend language to make
> asynchronous requests in my interface when some JavaScript knowledge
> is enough for that. Ajax is no better than document.write solutions
> ins 1999 unless we use it as an enhancement rather than relying on it.
>
> Efficiency is amazingly important, but even more so is looking at the
> end product and seeing how stable, friendly and efficient that one is.
> Thumbs up for Luke and Dan to build the unobtrusive Ruby for Rails
> plugin, this is a very important step in making us aware that the
> backend technology is there to provide a usable interface, and not to
> replace all the other parts of web development.
>
> --
> Chris Heilmann
> Book: http://www.beginningjavascript.com
> Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
> Writing: http://icant.co.uk/
> --
>
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