<<In Gardner's view there are two styles of technology that fall under the name Ajax. First, there is the acronym that specifies Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, but there is also Ajax as a generic term for a wider range of Rich Internet Applications, which may, for instance, substitute another scripting language for the Java version.
"Ajax is alive and well," Gardner says when asked about the current state of Ajax. "What's probably even more alive and well is a generic use of the word Ajax. I think what happened with Ajax is it became synonymous with Rich Internet Applications, which could be created through a number of technologies that have varying degrees of actual Ajax pure technology involved. So maybe we should separate Ajax as one approach for Rich Internet Applications and then generic use of Ajax meaning generally Rich Internet Application. The Ajax approach is doing very well and the generic version is doing extremely well. It's actually changing the impression people get from Internet applications." The impression Ajax provides is what Miko Matsumura, vice president of SOA product marketing at webMethods Inc., calls the human side of SOA. "SOA is cybernetic, which is to say half human and half machine," Matsumura said. "Ajax is one of many interface technologies which will help build the bridge between the machine side and the human side." The words "enjoy" and "technology" do not always go together well, but Gardner said both developers and end users are enjoying Ajax. "Developers are enjoying deploying it and end users are enjoying using it," the analyst said "Most people probably don't have a clue either consumers or end users in an enterprise that Ajax and these other variants of the rich Internet theme are benefiting them, but they are. They're seeing better graphs, better charts, better animations. So by all indications it's not just a hype curve, but a real, solid productivity benefit. Ajax is showing up not only in its most famous example, Google Maps, and more traditional desktop applications for online word processing and spreadsheets, but also in the booming online gaming industry and even in blogs, Gardner said. "I'm personally using it in my blog because I can do some rich things that are happening locally that don't ping the server," he said. "For example, you can do polling. I can have questions at the bottom of my blog and say: 'How many people plan to use Unix? How many people plan to use Windows?' I can generate a poll with a lot of the graphics and actions of that poll are being done on each person's browser on their own desktop. It's not necessarily going back and pinging the server each time." In Gardner's generic view of Ajax, developers can use traditional Ajax, or the more generic RIA approaches the make use of approaches such as Representational State Transfer (REST) or the new Microsoft approach formerly known at Atlas, but now also using the Ajax name. "What really the trend here is Rich Internet Applications, defined by working in the browser with a combination of scripting and XML," Gardner said. "It's the benefit that's important, not necessarily the precise way you gain that benefit." However, from the point of view of another analyst, Tony Baer, principal analyst at onStrategies Inc., the generic approach to Ajax has a plus side for developers, but a minus side in terms of standardization and reuse. "The good news and the bad news is that Ajax developers have more choices than ever," Baer said. "There are hundreds of tools, dozens of open source frameworks, but no standard frameworks or vocabularies in sight. For now, that means developers can grind out Ajax rich Web apps quickly and they don't have to worry about learning more industrial strength rich client, proprietary alternatives that Adobe, IBM, and Microsoft are promoting." The bad news in Baer's view is that the SOA promise of reuse is being lost in the Ajax shuffle.>> You can read this in full at: <http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1230362,00.html?track=NL-110&ad=571987&asrc=EM_NLN_746232&uid=5532089> Gervas
