AJAX-a-Go-Go
There were a lot of folks who were skeptical about AJAX development, particularly
in the business realm, where concerns arose about server-side manageability,
JavaScript-borne security threats and difficulties in testing and proving code.
To paraphrase William Shakespeare, some corporate dev pros felt AJAX was "a
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
A February report from Forrester Research showed that businesses -- and, in
particular, enterprises -- have been slow in adopting AJAX. But there's growing
evidence that these wait-and-see shops are piling onto the bandwagon.
Witness the activity at the AJAXWorld show last week, where Microsoft announced
that it was joining
the OpenAJAX Alliance. As RDN Executive Editor Jeffrey Schwartz put it,
the announcement "shows that this is clearly going to be the middle ground
of all rich Internet application development. Regardless of whether companies
are going to work with the Flex and WPF/E architectures, AJAX is a common denominator
in today's rich Internet applications architecture."
What's more, Forrester's Jeffrey Hammond contends that companies are underreporting
AJAX deployment, in part because development is happening at the departmental
level or in guerilla fashion.
Do you agree? Is your company starting to work with AJAX, and if so, is it
being implemented from a grassroots perspective? Let us know at [email protected].
Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/28/2007