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

Christian Heilmann codepo8 at gmail.com
Thu Aug 24 02:37:02 CDT 2006


> 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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