Sunday, February 26, 2006
Is AJAX changing the world?
Almost on a daily basis you see new new applications that are driven by the AJAX concept. I am not sure who started it first but I knew the first working public tested and accepted system when I saw the GMail application. Then came lot of applications like Google Suggest, Google Maps. Then came the mainstream web applications like BaseCamp, Writely, Meebo, Google Reader, Google Desktop and what not.. I don't have the list of all of them. Probably you can check out the list which Mike has at Techcrunch. Though all the list are not of AJAX, most of them are based on AJAX.
Now we are having two more launches. One from the never less Google - Google Page Creater for creating your web pages on the fly and the other is the online photo editing PXN8.
How are these companies/products doing? Just because they are AJAX based and having a great User Interface, will all these companies and products taste the success?
The reason I am feeling sceptical is just because the product is AJAX because will not inspire the people to use the product always. AJAX cannot simply be a differentiator. Ofcourse, with AJAX we can have better applications which can be used by the Business Users. Like, having a financial/HR applications used by the users which is far more easy to use and easy to deploy(install - Literally no install at all). Like, It exactly works in the same way a windows based GUI client works, but you dont need to install them on every body's machine.
Since I am working on a PeopleSoft platform, I find a resemblence between Event based architecture in AJAX and the Event based architecture in PeopleSoft PeopleTools. Except that in PeopleTools when you have made the page as Interactive mode and you tab out of the field and the event gets fired, it tries to refresh the whole page which is different from an AJAX based architecture. AJAX based architecture doesn't need to reload the page. And since AJAX is passing the XML data between the browser client and the server, the load on the server is going to be less when it is reloading for the events.
Probably I will talk about this at my next post at length.
Now we are having two more launches. One from the never less Google - Google Page Creater for creating your web pages on the fly and the other is the online photo editing PXN8.
How are these companies/products doing? Just because they are AJAX based and having a great User Interface, will all these companies and products taste the success?
The reason I am feeling sceptical is just because the product is AJAX because will not inspire the people to use the product always. AJAX cannot simply be a differentiator. Ofcourse, with AJAX we can have better applications which can be used by the Business Users. Like, having a financial/HR applications used by the users which is far more easy to use and easy to deploy(install - Literally no install at all). Like, It exactly works in the same way a windows based GUI client works, but you dont need to install them on every body's machine.
Since I am working on a PeopleSoft platform, I find a resemblence between Event based architecture in AJAX and the Event based architecture in PeopleSoft PeopleTools. Except that in PeopleTools when you have made the page as Interactive mode and you tab out of the field and the event gets fired, it tries to refresh the whole page which is different from an AJAX based architecture. AJAX based architecture doesn't need to reload the page. And since AJAX is passing the XML data between the browser client and the server, the load on the server is going to be less when it is reloading for the events.
Probably I will talk about this at my next post at length.
