The Ajax panel covered the basics including an excellent review of the existing Ajax toolkits as well as a discussion of the negatives surrounding its usage. The panel consisted of Dylan Schiemann (Dojo, Renkoo), Dori Smith, and Jesse James Garrett (Adaptive Path). Here are the notes:
- the Ajax term is a hook for technical folks to be able to use with business people (Garrett)
- Garrett’s Ajax article expanded reach into technical audience/community; Ajax was already well known among designers
- it’s easy to shoot yourself in the foot working with Ajax; everyone will make a lot of mistakes along the way
- cross domain issues can be a real problem (Dylan)
- getting started with Ajax
- determine requirements
- find a good toolkit or existing code – Dojo, MochKit, and Prototype are all open source
- learn more about JavaScript and HTTP
- reinventing the wheel – DHTML universe (pdf)
- JavaScript is flexible – the developers of these toolkits are influenced by the language where the developers came from
- Prototype – Ruby
- MochKit – Python
- Zimbra – Java
- YUI (Yahoo) – php
- Dojo – JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, etc.
- Dylan helped build Dojo to “make new mistakes”, enhance features and performance, and nothing existed at the time that met his requirements.
- Dylan’s slides for this panel are located at http://Dylan.io/swsw/ajax.pdf
- Dojo has over 30 contributors.
- Doris pointed out some of the negatives while working with Ajax and lumped them into two main categories – accessibility and usability
- what happens for people not using JavaScript – don’t have or turned off – they need to see something
- many technically savvy people believe JavaScript is a security nightmare, but it isn’t
- degradeability must be planned from the beginning; can’t add on at the end
- user expectations – what about the back button; people expect it to work
- users like to bookmark pages – this is very difficult on Ajax applications right now; need special links like Google maps (save this URL, etc.)
- must manage user expectations
- there are navigation issues; too many Ajax apps try to do too much too fast locking up resources and losing navigation
- “mystery meat navigation” – the UIs for Ajax are still developing; much is weird right now
- search engine friendliness – how much do Ajax apps give to Google, how much findability
- Ajax stands for: “JavaScript works now”
- why happening now? we know how to work with these technologies now
- the technology didn’t evolve that much, but the sophistication of those using it have
- Ajax is the next step, but not the last step in the evolution of web development
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