Interview with Ajaxian.com's Dion Almaer

Posted by Floyd Marinescu on Feb 26, 2007 09:48 AM

Community

.NET,

Ruby,

Java

Topics

Rich Internet Apps

Tags

DWR,

Prototype,

Dojo,

AJAX,

Scriptaculous

In this InfoQ interview, recoreded at Javapolis, Ajaxian cofounder Dion Almaer talks about the state of Ajax development today. Among the items he discusses are the history of how Ajax came to be, which frameworks he recommends developers consider, and tooling/debuggins support. Almaer also talks about security and general design considerations that need to be respected when creating Ajax enabled applications.

Watch Ajaxian.com's Dion Almaer interview (30:39 min)

I think what's cool about Ajax is that we totally change our web architectures. So now we think about Web 1.0 (although I think it's hilarious to put a version number to the web which changes every second), in the traditional web we have very, very, simple request responses, that were very very course grained pages loaded all the time. And that's great for doing HTTP and for retrieving the documents, which is of course what HTTP was invented for, what the web kind of came about for, but the problem is you can't build rich web applications that way. If you were building a swing, GUI or WinForm application and every time you change the little widget it redrew all the others widgets on the screen you would think that was a crazy architecture, but that's all we had to go with on the Web 1.0. So with Web 2.0, and using Ajax specifically within it, we get around that problem, we don't have to go back to the server and download the entire UI for every little thing that we do, we can make these asynchronous requests back to the server, get something back and then maybe tweak a little piece that's going on within our application and that totally changes the way in which we can build these apps, we can do a lot more rich user interfaces... and this is where Ajax is kind of revolutionizing the web.

Dion Almaer is the co-founder of Ajaxian.com where he blogs on Ajax topics daily. Previously, Dion worked with me at TheServerSide.com as Java editor.

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   Quick update on the state of affairs (from an AJAX perspective)

   Feb 23, 2007 1:23 PM by Malcolm Railey

   Thank you, Dion, for taking the time to create this interview. You covered a lot of ground in a short period of time, which is just what I needed to update me on how things have changed since the early days of EJB (which in 1999 I immediately discarded as a production product in lieu of direct development with JSPs and JDBC). In short, the industry has moved about a thousand miles.

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   Debugging JS/AJAX

   Mar 1, 2007 2:12 PM by Dallas Vaughan

   I'm surprised he mentioned DOM Inspector and Venkman but didn't mention probably the best tool available today for JS debugging, DOM "inspecting", and even CSS debugging - Firebug (http://www.getfirebug.com).

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   Eclipse Ajax Toolkit Framework (ATF)

   Mar 2, 2007 1:00 PM by Wayne Beaton

   Have you seen the Eclipse ATF? It has support for debugging JavaScript (running in a browser within the Eclipse IDE), inspection of DOMs, JavaScript console, CSS inspection, etc. It's only version 0.2.1 right now, but is pretty powerful. I've been blogging about it recently.

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   Re: Eclipse Ajax Toolkit Framework (ATF)

   Mar 3, 2007 7:28 AM by Alwin Joseph

   " I think what's cool about Ajax is that we totally change our web architectures " Rod Johnson, We need 2.0 version of J2ee design and Implementation. Covering strut 2 , Spring MVC , Spring Web Flow , Dojo , web productivity and web 2.0 stack. As Spring community where we are heading in this space.

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   Re: Eclipse Ajax Toolkit Framework (ATF)

   May 24, 2007 1:17 PM by Vinupriya Mariyanayagam

   " I think what's cool about Ajax is that we totally change our web architectures " Rod Johnson, We need 2.0 version of J2ee design and Implementation. Covering strut 2 , Spring MVC , Spring Web Flow , Dojo , web productivity and web 2.0 stack. As Spring community where we are heading in this space.

   Reply

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