AJAX ROCKET SCIENCE

Filed in archive Application Development on October 29, 2005

I'm going to start working on a project that will include "lots of AJAX." I think it is funny that a person would say something let that to me. I mean no disrespect to that person at all because right after I heard those words I got all excited, as I normally do, at the prospect of working on a cool new project. Me thinking it was funny came later when I started thinking about how we were going to do it and do it right.

Full Disclosure: To this point I haven't done any substantial development work with AJAX other then working through a few tutorials and seeing how it works. The primary reason for this is that, and I'm being totally honest here, I hate javascript and avoid working with it whenever possible. That is not to say that I don't use it all the time it is just that if I have the option of working with it or not I tend avoid it.

My dislike for JavaScript started back in 2000 when I had to do extensive work with DHTML. At the time I wrote tons of code to make different browsers work with our projects and it was always very painful. There would always be something that went wrong in our QA department and I felt like I was applying Band-Aid after Band-Aid to make things work. If anyone ever did the smell test on that code they would have stumbled away heaving their guts out. Needless to say I was not proud of it but it worked out OK.

Fast-forward to 2005 and I still use JavaScript with my projects but not the crazy amounts of code I used to. I try and use the KISS principle with the JavaScript I have to write. AJAX looks to me as though more those days of writing tons of JavaScript are about to return and I don't want to go back there unless I absolutely have to. My major concerns are:

• Getting AJAX to work across different browsers


• What do we do when JavaScript is disabled


• Is our application built in a secure manner when AJAX is used(related to #2)

One glimmer of hope I have in all this is something I heard in the on a recent Ajaxian.com podcast. Ben and Dion interviewed Alex Russell of the Dojo project.

"Dojo is an Open Source toolkit that allows you to easily build dynamic capabilities into web pages and any other environment that supports JavaScript." ... The project is providing many APIs to assist in the development of AJAX components so people don't need to start from scratch. That will hopefully help me with the first item on my list. The others will take lots of thought and testing to overcome but that should not be a problem. Just knowing that there are projects out there trying to make AJAX development easier is a good thing. I plan to take advantage of them whenever possible.

I don't think AJAX is rocket science. We just need more projects like DOJO.