Ajax at last

I have always felt that HTML and more recently XML/XSL were a step back from object oriented programming and rich user interfaces.

In the mid-90’s, we had very neat C++ user interface (UI) frameworks implementing a model-view-controller (MVC) like Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). With these frameworks we could build 100% object oriented applications that were:

• Easy to architect, design, develop, test and maintain especially because the tools were very mature;


• Providing rich UI features like complex controls, dynamic data exchange, object linking and embedding, drag and drop or notifications that update the interface when the underlying data changes.

It all went away with the advent of HTML, a rudimentary technology to present and link documentation pages, which has been diverted from its original purpose to develop business applications, just because IT departments were missing the days of mainframes when an application had to be deployed only once on a server to be available everywhere.

Suddenly our applications became very slow. Everything had to be done with a bunch of simplistic UI controls. Data had to be round-tripped to the server to be validated or for the user interface to be updated accordingly. We had to page through long lists to find our items with limited sorting capabilities. Merging data into Word was near to impossible except using the old copy-paste trick. Without proper tools, architecting, designing, developing, testing and maintaining these applications was significantly more difficult.

Then came Java with Swing and the promise of an MVC framework including rich UI controls. I really thought that Java would become the Holy Grail of web interfaces. Java applets were offering the best of both worlds with the promise of “develop once, run everywhere”. But again, we have been deceived; the promise was not kept and information technology (IT) departments did not want to deploy the plug-in with some help from Microsoft, who ditched Java after embracing it.

Not long ago after releasing .NET framework, Microsoft has praised the benefits of ‘smart clients’ which would offer the best of web architectures and rich user interfaces but nobody really bought into it.

Now the market reiterates its promise of a rich UI for the web with Asynchronous JavaScript and Xml (Ajax). People will tell you that Ajax has been around for quite some time and that Outlook Web Access 2000 was the first application implementing Ajax in the late 90’s. Ajax is based on the XMLHttpRequest object which is available since Internet Explorer version 4. XMLHttpRequest allows code to pass a request to the server without reposting the entire page but Ajax is much more than that otherwise we would have heard about it before.

To get a rich UI, you need much more that the XMLHttpRequest object; you need:

1. support from the industry which includes browser manufacturers and the support for XMLHttpRequest in Mozilla and other browsers is very recent;


2. A choice of UI component frameworks that use XMLHttpRequest in the background to provide rich UI features because like me, you do not want to reinvent the wheel and develop a library of UI components. Infragistics, Telerik, ComponetArt, ComponentOne and the others have only recently released their Ajax UI frameworks.

To be honest, Ajax is a jumble of technologies clumsily put together: some Javascript code within an HTML page scripts a binary client object to post data using HTTP to a web server where some Java or .NET code is interpreted by a virtual machine in view to retrieve or save data into a SQL database. I know Ajax is not the whole chain, but what a mess! This mess has good chances to win the rich UI also known as Web 2.0 battle because it does not compromise the ease of deployment of applications. After 10 years of web architecture hegemony, it is going to be good to retrieve the user experience of rich user interfaces.