Jun 2 2006

Ajax's Disruptive Influences?

Posted by Joe Rinehart at 7:05 AM
5 comments - Categories: Web Development | Causing Trouble

There's an article over at AjaxWorld magazine about why Ajax is so "distruptive" in that it changes the playing field for normal software development. I think the first part of the article is great: it talks about how "Web 2.0" sites don't need to have Ajax, and how Ajax is encouraging better Web software design by encouraging developers/architects to write their applications as APIs.

(Article is at http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/173115.htm)

However, I'm not sure I agree with the five "Disruptive Influences" of Ajax:

  1. "The End of Software Upgrades, Fixes, and Security Patches"

    2. I don't see how this is Ajax-specific. Non-Ajax web apps...same thing?

  2. "Software and Data Available Wherever You Go"

    3. ...Because it's browser based? Again, not much to do with Ajax.

  3. "Isolated Software Can't Compete with Connected Software"

    4. The "Web as a platform" in which Web sites use services from other Web sites has been around for a long, long time.

  4. "Deprecation of the Traditional Operating System"

    5. Not binding software to the OS, again, has naught to do with Ajax.

  5. "Software That Is Invisible"

    6. Web software is naturally of a lighter weight than desktop. Its smaller control set has encouraged more elementary UI. Like anything else, it can be used well or poorly, but not much to do with Ajax specifically.

So what do I think is the disruptive force of Ajax?

I don't think the major disruptive force of Ajax is one that specifically disrupts software on the desktop. Instead, I think it's just that a lot of Ajax and/or RIA sites do something a lot of software doesn't: make users happy.

A good example is Google Maps (or Yahoo! Maps Beta). It's so easy and natural to use a draggable map that using MapQuest again becomes painful. Heck, it's fun to use Google Maps for the first time.

Even with this aspect, though, I wonder the disruptive force of Ajax is overblown. I'm sure the first GUIs were mindblowing. However, once everyone can do it, a lot more people were available to screw it up. And I think Ajax will go the same way. Right now, a lot of the high profile Ajax sites are employing the top people in the Ajax community. It makes sense that they'd then, therefore, be of good quality. What's going to happen when an Ajax site goes from being a rarity to the norm? I'm sure we'll see some lousy, disapppointing Ajax UIs.

Comments

Gus

Gus wrote on 06/02/06 8:07 AM

Joe,

I think what makes Ajax ( and RIA's in general ) disruptive in a way that traditional web apps/sites don't is that the functionality tends to be more like a desktop app.

Take the maps example. The things that make Google maps so superior to Mapquest are things like the ability to pan, zoom and navigate around seemlessly. This functionality has been available on desktop map applications (like Delorme maps) for many years.

Bringing this kind functionality to the web makes things very difficult for desktop map software developers. Mapquest was not really a competitor to desktop map applications, Google maps is.
JesterXL

JesterXL wrote on 06/02/06 8:44 AM

Good points Joe; I agree with all. Silver lining is the parellels you can draw from similiar advents, like blogs. Yes, giving a lot of people who have nothing to express, or those who steal other people's content for the sake of Google AdSense revenue is an example of what happens when those types of technologies become mundane and aren't used to their fullest. However, I'm commenting on a good blog now, and am happy blogging got popular enough for people who wouldn't normally share their thoughts publicly can now do so.

So, while some people will use AJAX techniques who shouldn't, I think the benefits far outweigh the bad stuff.
John Farrar

John Farrar wrote on 06/02/06 9:35 AM

Good post.

1. Agree'd

2. I think the point is that you can control getting back just the data you want better with an AJAX page. More responsive in an ongoing data senario.

3. Yes, just wait for Apollo! Multiplatform without the issues of browser compadibility. (That is the one I am waiting for... can't wait till they get Flex out of the way! Don't mind Flex, but don't see that as the true future product for Adobe. I think they are looking at the wrong egg basket for future aspirations.)

4. Missed this one. They future will run without binding the OS, but the functionality of sites will be more inline with an OS. Right now you buy and OS and applications run on top of it. In the future applicaions we write for the web will be stand alone, yet integrated applications. They will share look and feel of the site rather than building the presentation into content. They will share user authentication. They will allow you to write your applications with different methdologies and they will run side by side. People will wonder what was hard to understand once they see it. (Again... it's how it runs, and it won't be about binding to an OS.)

5. Right... no need to agree with the invisible argument. It's a cool sounding statement that says nothing that isn't already there in reality. (And invisible is evangelistically inacurate.)

VERY GOOD POST! Thanks for the thoughts!
Jason

Jason wrote on 06/08/06 9:15 AM

Excellent critique, and on the money. All 5 points can be addressed with any well-written web app, for instance by using CF and JS in your HTML, without the need for Ajax.

Ajax' disruptive force? May be overblown, but I think it will be in the little things, the things that simply make user experience better. When I moved from VB to CF years ago, there were some usability aids that got sacrificed, such as auto-jumping to entries in a select box as you type more than one letter (so that typing A goes to "Ajax" on the list, and then typing P goes to "Apple" on the list, and NOT to "Poor Usability"). Now, that's a feature that can be solved pretty easily with JS, and it's not a thing that Ajax gives some benefit on, but the real-time flexibility of actually executing server calls and re-formatting the current page based on user interaction certainly gives designers and programmers better tools for making the UI simply better. The obvious example, I think, is linked selects, where the 2nd cascades from the 1st. With Ajax, I don't have to generate 100s of lines of JS to make related arrays, because I can call the database to fill the 2nd select based on the selection in the 1st. I would also agree with you, though, that using Ajax gives no certainty that poor UIs can't be made. Reminds me of the Flash boom a few years ago ... Flash was and is a great way to recreate some of the client/server types of interaction (drag and drop, for instance), yet it was consistently used for lousy UIs. No nav, no "back", no site maps, long load times, etc. Ajax can often solve the long load time issue, by letting new data get called later in the process, but I think we can definitely expect some apps to be heavy on the design and light on the usability as more sites use Ajax.
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