FireAnt and MSN AJAX Framework
FireAnt is communications part of the AJAX framework shared by Hotmail, Start.com, MyMSN and MSN Spaces, Omar shahine posted on his blog the experience to deliver new architecture to Hotmail. They studyed different possibilities :
1. Modification of the current C/C++ ISAPI architecture to support a hybrid ASP model. 2. .NET rewrite for the DataLayer and BusinessLayer and XML/XSLT for the PresentationLayer 3. Same as #2 but the Presentation layer would be JavaScript, XMLHTTP, and DHTML/CSS. This now has the fancy name, AJAX.
After much deliberating, we chose #3, and started running. For 4 weeks basically 1 PM, a developer and an intern built a prototype, and then the real thing he said. I noticed that AJAX developers are today hired by big firms such microsoft, yahoo, google ... Just send your resume if interested ! I've seen at least 3 AJAX job offers this month only.
We extended .NET Attributes to mark classes and methods as FireAnt classes/methods and at build time the script is generated. If you think of SOAP support in the .NET Framework, it’s basically similar. As a developer you do not worry about generating SOAP messages, or building a SOAP parser. All you do is mark your method as [WebMethod] and your classes as [Serializable] and the .NET framework takes care of proxying, class generation etc. That’s what we were shooting for.
This was a big deal for us as it allows us to be incredibly productive. Since last summer, we have built a ton of features using FireAnt and the JavaScript Frameworks from Scott Isaacs. Late last fall we went up to Redmond and showed FireAnt to a number of folks in MSN, one of those folks was Steve Rider. It was really exciting to see the looks on folks faces when Walter (our FireAnt “architect”) setup his “Hello World” demo. You could just see that people realized that doing AJAX style development any other way was crazy.
Personaly I'm not interested in .NET development, but its great to learn from other developper's experience.
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