Is Ajax the new Java?

Or will it be better?

Ajax, for asynchronous JavaScript and XML, has made some fairly serious inroads in major consumer-oriented Web sites.

Newspapers are also using the technology to make their Web pages look spiffier and more interactive (see “Sacbee.com’s new look better showcases what paper has to offer,” Newspapers & Technology, June 2006).

In a nutshell, Ajax lets Web designers make pages more responsive by eliminating the need to reload the entire Web page each time a user makes a change.

A lot of consumers will use an Ajax site and not recognize it, perhaps believing it’s just a cool new feature. In reality, Ajax has the potential to be a truly transformative development, in ways that were often promised by Java, which never lived up to the hype.

Ahead of its time

Java was a bit ahead of its time in some ways. Remember back in the late ‘90s when encountering a Java Applet on a 133-megahertz machine was enough to bring the workstation to its knees? Or trying to run Java on a Mac with any operating system prior to OS X? I remember many times when I’d see that JVM (Java Virtual Machine) starting up and frantically hit the back bar as fast as I could in order to try and prevent a total machine drag-down.

Nowadays, running that same exact Applet on a modern Pentium dual-core machine would probably be effortless. But how many Web sites outside of internal corporate applications run Java anymore? It was too much, too soon.

Ajax is different. It was unveiled at a time when Web standards were well-evolved, and when you could sense increasing restlessness for what is now often called Web 2.0 technology due to limitations of conventional stateless or light-state Web pages.

Blurs the line

An Ajax page blurs the line between a conventional Web page and an application, and when done well, does it nearly seamlessly to an end user. I like to think of it as Flash without the plug-in (apologies to Adobe). For things like fancy advertising messages, Flash still seems to be the way to go, but developers seem to be gravitating towards Ajax for interactive Web applications.

I can’t think of a better mass-market application of Ajax than the new Yahoo members’ page. If you’ve used this at all and wondered how it works, it’s being done with the exchange of XML back and forth from client (browser) to servers on demand.

When the mouse is dragged over a section, such as Mail, Weather or Local, XML is passed back to the browser and that fresh data is displayed in a new section of the page, without having to refresh and rebuild the entire HTML container.

It’s really exciting to be able to do that with Mail and see your message subject lines actually appear, proving that Yahoo is pulling over what are fairly complex blocks of XML from what is probably a variety of servers, in essence remapping part of an application (Mail) to a section of another independent Web page.

Now, when I do that for the first session instance on my 933 Mhz Compaq tablet laptop, I can feel the whole machine briefly bog as the XML flows aboard in bulk, but when I do the same thing on my newer Pentium Dual Core, it’s instantaneous. That kind of browser behavior really blurs the line between Web page and application, and the more you use it, the more you like it. If you’re a techno-geek, you like it because you appreciate the elegance, but if you’re “just a user,” you appreciate it because it’s faster and presents a better interface.

Comparing

For comparison, go back to an old-style automotive inventory search site, and watch the entire page blank out and laboriously rebuild as you work your way through the menus of Make, Model, Year Range, and so on, and individual pieces of JavaScript load in fresh pages each drill-down. If you then imagine how slick that same menu hierarchy would work with Ajax, you start to understand why so many developers are redesigning sites behind the scenes and rolling them out.

A great Web source for links to getting started with Ajax or simply to learn more about the technology is available at http://dmoz.org/ Computers/Programming/Languages/JavaScript/Ajax/. You might get some ideas about new ways to use it on a news- or entertainment-oriented site.