AJAX Still Gaining Momentum

If you are a developer and haven't heard of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), perhaps it's time you crawled out from under that rock you live. AJAX technologies have been around for a few years now, but within the last 12 months or so it has really started to take off. In fact, all of the major players seem to have embraced the idea. If you head to Sun's Java site, the landing page is filled with links to AJAX articles, tips, and tools. In fact today, the site contains an announcement that Sun has joined the OpenAJAX Alliance and Dojo Foundation. I guess Sun thinks AJAX is relevant enought to "actively participate in these two communities to help drive open standards for AJAX programming and increase interoperability across AJAX technologies." And let's not forget the other major players; Microsoft's Atlas framework is offered for free and integrates seamlessly with ASP .NET 2.0. Google wasn't about to miss the boat either, recently releasing their Google Web Toolkit. GWT let's you "You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML."

I really think that AJAX applications are going to continue to flood the web. All the coolest stuff out there seem to make use of it in some way or another, such as GoogleMaps, GMail and Google Calendar, and Zip.ca. As these applications find a place on the internet, gone are the days of differentiating between desktop applications and web applications - or at least we'll be a lot closer.

I have yet to dive into the world of AJAX from a hands-on perspective, but I have read a lot of material on the subject and have started to put together some preliminary work. Actually, I'm gonna take that back. I have done a significant amount of "AJAX" development, and this was about 3 years ago (before it was actually called AJAX). I developed a web application for three agriculturalists that allowed users to create quotes for crop hail insurance, compare prices, and finally purchase the insurance. The application made it possible to change different values, resulting in an update of all of the information on the page, without an annoying refresh.

In Professional Ajax, the Hidden Frame Technique is defined, and considered to be the first asynchronous request / response model for web applications.

As developers began to understand how to manipulate frames, a new technique emerged to facilitate client-server communication. The hidden frame technique involved setting up a frameset where one frame was set to a width or height of 0 pixels, and its sole purpose was to initiate communication with the server. The hidden frame would contain an HTML form with specific form fields that could be dynamically filled out by JavaScript and submitted back to the server. When the frame returned, it would call another JavaScript function to notify the original that data had been returned. The hidden frame technique represented the first asynchronous request/response model for web applications.

Even though this is far from the current AJAX frameworks which make use of an AJAX engine, I think it is safe to say that I was an early adopter of this revolutionary model. As I learn more about how to implement this framework, I can't help wonder how much cooler I could make the above mentioned hail insurance system. I've thrown the idea at the three guys who own the company, and a real interest was there after I explained the advantages it could offer. It also makes it a much easier sell when you show them some of those revolutionary web apps that are already out there.