One Year of AJAX and a little more
We are still using today the same browsers with the same standards HTML, Javascript, CSS, XML, … the difference between today and one year ago is the way we interact between these technologies. Personaly in the previous years I focused too much on server side technology and to be more precise on PHP as a scripting language and all kind of databases Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL …, but the client side programming was very simple such some validations, small scripts here and there, nothing really impressive.
Maybe the first time I used XMLHttpRequest was three years ago with a live search that I have written in phptunisie.net, in that time we just call it Javascript. Then I was inspired by some websites like for examples Orkut which is using a very nice rating pages, where you can rate your friends with images, no forms, no submit buttons, just by choosing the suitable image and its saved. I used similar techniques in some of my websites but with iframes, and it start giving me a larger vision of interactions inside the website that we rarely used before. Then there was Gmail and you should know the rest…
The word AJAX itself isn's something new or a new technology but something that we were using before. So what was new in the word AJAX ?
Static Vs Dynamic
With the first websites we call dynamic website anything that come with images, animations … etc, even a small DHTML effect and you can call it dynamic. Then the name was used for server side programming, by reloading an index.php script could generate different content from database. And we called static the simple HTML pages. But it wasn't enought ! Today AJAX websites are more dynamic and fast by making content change without even reloading the page or submitting forms.
The concept of Static and Dynamic page have changed not only in the technical way they are conceived, but you can feel the difference in their usage. Let's have a concrete example, try using Gmail with the HTML version for few time to check your email, then change and use the default AJAX version. You can read your email with both, but feel the second interface more confortable, more user friendly, and specially more dynamic !
Web 2.0
As we started talking about AJAX, we started talking about the Web 2.0 too. Since we used AJAX to describe the technology, web 2.0 was created to describe this new trend of dynamic websites. The new concept of web 2.0 is not only a marketing way for new products, but also a new kind of websites which have been developped, with fresh design and colors, original ideas, lot of social and sharing software but everything web-based.
AJAX for mobile
In the same way, AJAX have been introduced for mobile with Opera, Internet explorer … But in my opinion it's too early to see rich web application for mobile for many reasons. The main reason remain in web browsers that PDA and smartphone are running. For example in my Smartphone running windows mobile, internet explorer is very bad for browsing web : slow, buggy and is really inappropriate for mobile websites navigations. Opera still an excellent alternative, but the problem for mobile is that website developped for mobile have others problems of usability before we can talk about rich web experience for mobile.
But AJAX would be an excellent solution for mobile website if we talk about performance on bandwidth consuming. We should always consider that usually mobile internet providers charge their customers for the bandwidth they are using.
Conclusion
To conclude AJAX succeeded to make the web different with the same technologies we were using before ! This remind me an article I have written two years ago about inventions and innovations, we don't have to invent new things every day, but we can innove. Understanding better the technologies that we are currently using, and make more profit from them. At least in the future if we want to make things better, we know already what we have.
Subscribe to AJAX Magazine's feed