Roman’s blog

Ajax

Gallery …

If you are into IT you might be stumbled accross the concept of “Hypecycles” which is the preferred way for Gartner to position a particular technology. The basic idea is that every technology goes through different stages of visibility and maturity:

Altough Gartner has some articles on Ajax and Web2.0 I couldn’t find this topic on their hypecycle yet. However, Technorati helps by providing some fine statistics. Here you can see the number of blog articles which mention the term Ajax for the last year (173,264 in total):

We clearly can see a peak in February/March 2006 and a fall-off afterwards. What can we infer from that? Well, we know that the term was coined on Feb. 18th, 2005 by James Garret so according to the typical Hypecycle Ajax needed a little more than a year to reach the “peak of inflated expectation” (in Gartner speak). I guess it will take another year to reach the stage “Trhough of disillusionment” with some sort of stabilisation aftwerwards. In contrast to the hypecylce-visibility the frequency of mentions in online-articles will probably not rise again from there on. How often do you see “hot topic” articles on DBMSs nowadays (clearly a matured technology)?

Somewhere on a wall in Hamburg:

Love you to :-*

Do you think Microsoft is done with applets? You’re wrong. Read this:

A recent update to Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 included a change that alters the way users interact with applets in the browser … With this change, users can no longer directly interact with applets by default. Users are first required to manually activate the applet’s user interface, before interacting with the applets. If the page has multiple applets, users have to activate each applet’s user interface individually.

Ajax definitely is this year’s web-hype. Putting hype dynamics aside and judging on technical merits only you might be realizing how close Java Applet technology was to Ajax already seven years ago. LiveConnect which was introduced in Netscape 3.0 enables Java-to-Javascript communication within web-applications. With it you could move rampant Javascript hacks into a powerful strongly typed language with the benefit of having vast amounts utility libraries available at your fingertips. In Java it’s a no-brainer to do things like XMLHttpRequest or building and emitting (X)HTML, so why isn’t this the infrastructure for Ajax as we see it today? Java missed a chance here. I see the following reasons preventing wide-spread adoption of Java and LiveConnect:

• LiveConnect is about Applets and Applets have a bad reputiation (slow, ugly-looking grey rectangles in your webpage)
• Incomplete and inconventienly implemented interfaces to the browser internals (e.g. the DOM, see an introduction to JSObject here)
• Poor documenation; If you google for LiveConnect you end up with documents from the 90ies (see here and here). One can hardly find representative examples or tutorials. LiveConnect still seems to be “some obscure technology”
• Cross browser standardization: Definitely Microsoft’s internet explorer helped to prevent any significant dissemination of LiveConnect.

Still, Java in the browser isn’t dead. Altough not talking about LiveConnect every once in a while somewhere new ideas for Java-Browser integration do pop up. I guess when Ajax matures the need for a more powerful programming environment will emerge. Java would be a good fit.