Ever since my Yahoo!Sports Boxscore learned to update itself I thought I had sensed the future of web application development. While it took some time for the trickle of innovation to finally coalesce itself into a major movement. I knew even back then that it could one day be much more than just “cool use of javascript.” 4 years later its finally here and its called AJAX.

I discovered AJAX, the acronym, about 6 month back (I know, I’m not exactly on the bleeding edge), as I was impressed with the mariad of dynamic application released onto the web and wanted to understand the technology required to build these applications. In February, an article by Jesse James Garrett on the topic officially kicked off the revolution. You can find it here: Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications and here. While the individual technologies nor its applications are revolutionary (like I said, its 4 years in the making, atleast) the coherent framework, the “naming,” programing support, and UI designer adoption all points to the fact that we have reached a tipping point. Like many innovative technologies, its the fact that it reached the inflection point purely on word of mouth that signals a major change.

Even back in 1999 people knew that web-based applications were decidedly inferior from an user experience stand point. Its slow, its mechanical, and it forces the user to adopt to its paradigm rather than the other way around. At the time I was designing web-based applications for the construction industry and some of the most common complaints was that it was slow, (click & wait), it doesnt anticipate the user’s responces, and that it doesnt take advantage of the entire keyboard: forcing the end user to rely heavily on the mouse. (The industry could care less that the web was “hot” and that everyone else was doing it, hell, it was still in love with AS/400 the amber colored prompt - and rightly so) As anyone who has worked at a job heavily dependent on using the computer, the mouse is one of the slowest input devices for the expert user. Many companies balked at paying/subscribing our web application for that reason despite the many advantages of a web-hosted application (accessibility, compatibility, platform independance, lack IT dependency, cost of ownership, etc). They knew that in the end, the end user must LIKE using the software.

Web was born out of a stateless “pull” archicture while traditional client server is both pull and push. What resulted was that web based application MUST be synchronous and dependent on the user to let the server know the status and change of its various states. In the beginning days of the hype surrounding web services, several startups were founded based on the idea of bring web app user interface and messaging architecture out of the dark ages to the equivalence of the client/server world. These startups sold a combination of application servers and browser plugins (sometime w/o the browser component ) to accomplish what essentially AJAX does. Kanamea was one of the most hyped companies doing this. They were all too early and too dependent on a closed architecture.

Ajax Rising: WebApp 2.0 Contd