@mediaAjax day 1.1: The State of Ajax

The State of Ajax

@mediaAjax opened with a fascinating comparison with the current state of Ajax wrt the state in 2006 according to Ajaxian (where the authors wanted better/faster JavaScript, offline support, framework consolidation, tools inc. debugging: Speed increases in Firefox and Safari were contrasted with no change from IE, and the tantalising suggestion of a JIT compiler from Adobe from Flash 9 (Tamarin?) and Screaming Monkey (a Mozilla plugin for IE?!) bears further investigation (and drooling...) JavaScript 2 (optional typing, object model, namespaces, packages etc) is the subject of a talk tomorrow but the Ajaxian guys described two political camps -- those who want improvement and change, and those who want stability. Offline JS? Google Gears and Adobe Air. Graphics? <canvas> and SVG are slow but Firefox and Opera have hints of OpenGL acceleration in the pipeline. As for frameworks (Dojo, YUI, Prototype, script.aculo.us, JQuery, Mochikit, ExtJS, GWT, DWR, …), despite Prototype and JQuery moving together the guys' recommendation was throw a dart at the wall to choose between them ;-) Tools? Firebug (yay!), IE dev. toolbar, Safari DOM Inspector.

Referring-to Ran Aroussi's Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design got a deserved LOL so I'm copying it here:

Then they talked about a few of the categories, mentioned WHATWG and HTML5 (where apparently Ian Hickson, also at Google, leveraged the Google search index to look for common class names etc -- this is potentially relevant to a PhD project I'm involved in supervising.) Interaction lag was mentioned (quoting Nielsen: 0.1s delay is noticeable, 1s interrupts workflow, longer wait is nasty) and the fact that Ajax is constrained by browsers' single thread model, which causes UI lag if compute-intensive/slow tasks are running (and Ajax encourages background tasks...) Google Gears adds "worker pool" threads to solve this and Caja for security.

Ajax on the desktop? Adobe AIR, Joyent Slingshot (for Rails), Mozilla Prism.

They finished by describing an encouraging trend, quoting Apple's British chief designer that the days of "functional", just-working app's is over, JS/web app's have matured so that users expect "sexy" design, quoting Donald Norman (author of Emotional Design): Attractive things work better.