What is AJAX? Does Microsoft do AJAX?

Ajax is “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML”. If you’ve ever used Microsoft Outlook Web (OWA), then you’ve used AJAX. Microsoft wrote OWA with hidden embedded web requests, so OWA could get and display new mail without refreshing the page all the time. Within a few years, everyone was doing this in several different ways. Microsoft was a pioneer, but AJAX is not Microsoft technology.

JavaScript (the modest little webpage scripting language) was one surprising ingredient. JavaScript was combined with something we got from Web Services: XML. That’s right-- Microsoft’s hidden browser function was combined with JavaScript and with some of the fast, light, network-ready data formats that we all learned from web services and SOAP, to create AJAX. Like magic, XML was being sent into web pages, “from behind”, to display data and reformat pages. The best part? It’s fast.

“Atlas” was Microsoft’s first AJAX toolkit, released in 2007. When Microsoft renamed it to “AJAX toolkit 1.0”, many Microsoft developers were unhappy because they lost the cool name. But Microsoft knew what they were doing, because we’ve already been asked by clients why our AJAX is working, even though they never installed Microsoft AJAX on their
server!

Unfortunately, Microsoft AJAX toolkit is not yet a tool of common choice, and many Microsoft.NET programmers compare the AJAX toolkit to early versions of FrontPage(they assume it will get much better before being replaced with something else entirely). As of right now, Microsoft AJAX Toolkit doesn’t easily stand up to such libraries as Prototype, Dojo, Scriptaculous, and General Interface, in the same manner that Front Page (which has now been replaced by SharePoint Designer) didn’t survive well in the market against Adobe Dreamweaver.

Before MS AJAX arrived, these other toolkits were listing clients on their websites from Gucci to NASA to Apple to ESPN to Sony, and even Microsoft! Developers who use only Microsoft tools may say AJAX is slow, because Microsoft AJAX can be slow. AJAX tools are already far more sophisticated than Web Service tools ever became, and the simple truth is that good web programming now requires qualified, experienced pros.

How does NSK do AJAX?

NSK uses an in-house AJAX library, which was specifically designed to do three things. It performs as well or better than equivalent Windows-based applications. It is learned easily by developers, so work for our clients can be done quickly and inexpensively. And our framework is useable on many browsers (in addition to Internet Explorer), and is 100% compatible with all current major server and development technologies, including Microsoft.NET. We’ve seen development turn-around as short as eight months, on financial industry projects of considerable complexity.

Written by Keith Mitchell, Senior Developer at NSKinc

Web 2.0, AJAX, XML, Thin Clients, and You

"Web 2.0 and AJAX have already changed web programming and business application development to the same extent that managed care has already changed the healthcare industry, and boxing gloves have already changed boxing."

Most web programmers learn quickly how to use a submit button, which allows a user to wait for the next web page to come back to them and tell them the results of their action. Most accomplished web programmers have learned how to display a table of data, and to sort the data by waiting for the page to refresh. Most accomplished web programmers have also explained to clients many times, that they can’t type into a dropdown list; they can only choose one of the values in the list, because “that’s the way the web thing works”.

Now, web programming isn’t so simple. Forms can be updated and data can be sorted, faster than you can read the confirmation messages. No one has to wait for pages to reload any more. New descriptions can be added to a list, and stored into a database, simply by typing them into a dropdown box. A web form can enter and correct data faster than a user can type.

The admission requirements for the web programmer club are getting higher. Microsoft and Adobe are writing tools to make these tasks easy, but these tools are still in their infancy.

Written by Keith Mitchell, Senior Developer at NSKinc

Linux, Apache Platforms

Linux/Apache as a platform has been doing web-based networking, backed by large-scale community development, for a long time. The most mature SPAM filters , email handlers, RSS tools, web data-miners, and web automation tools are Linux/Apache based. For those tasks, that’s what we may recommend. These services or components can be integrated easily with Microsoft Exchange and other Microsoft servers and systems.

Are we talking about “Open Systems” or “Open Software”?

No. We’re really trying to discuss the important business move toward open architectures. Enterprise or service architecture is not related to “open systems” or “open software”. For open systems, think “UNIX-like systems which have been standardized”. For open software, think free Linux software, free licensing, and community development.

Is Linux more “open” for business software architectures?

No. What matters are your software applications, not your systems. Linux is important, however, because most of the web runs on Apache web servers running on Linux, and the internet (worldwide) and intranet (corporate) ARE vital to open architectures.

Written by Keith Mitchell, Senior Developer at NSKinc