A Bunch of AJAX-Based Application Frameworks
The “Songhay System Flash MX Toolkit,” published in 2003, betrays the assumption that the Web browser would never become a serious cross-platform application domain without the intervention of a proprietary sandbox—like the one from Macromedia/Adobe.
Yes, according to the Wikipedia.org article, Microsoft had their DHTML, “XML Data Island” technology since 1998 and AJAX-like functionality was in Outlook Web Access! But the opinion here is that, when Firefox 1.0 came out in 2004/2005, the stage was set to reduce the role of the proprietary sandbox—namely the Macromedia/Adobe sandbox. One might say that Mozilla.org contributed to Macromedia being acquired by Adobe but let’s leave that for another inaccurate, unbalanced Blog entry.
“Rants of a Robert Penner Flash MX Disciple” reveals my concern for Robert Penner. His web site seems frozen in time—seemingly stunned by the release of Flash MX 2004, which seriously revises and makes obsolete most of his knowledge about the Flash platform. But perhaps he is not stunned at all. Perhaps, barring any personal issues, he pulled back from Flash technology to get a little closer to AJAX. When your primary goal is to present data in a “rich” UI, AJAX appears to be the superior, cost-effective alternative to Macromedia Flash and puts serious pressure on their newer Flex technology—however, Dreamweaver is in a position of strength here.
Dreamweaver users can download one of the many AJAX “frameworks” out there and keep on keeping on… the hard part is choosing. I’ve started with http://script.aculo.us/ and http://dojotoolkit.com/. Thomas Fuchs’ technology is based on prototype and prototype forks into Ruby on Rails, Rico and then back to http://script.aculo.us/. There are so many more frameworks as celebrated by Ajaxian.com that I am overwhelmed as well as excited. But it appears that ‘everything’ is based on prototype—this __prototype__ stuff reminds me of Robert Penner again…
One principle to use to eliminate many of these contenders for my attention is to stick with non-commercial releases that are based on the “unobtrusive” style of JavaScript—a style typified by the Ajaxian.com post “SilverStripe Tree Control.” Another principle out there is to separate visual effects frameworks, like Rico, from frameworks that include a wrapper for the actual XmlHttpRequest (not many of these out there apart from dojo). ajaxpatterns.org helps me to orient somewhat… but the problem is that I see a need for a more modularized approach—down to fine grains of code. I am often left with the impression that many of these offers assume that I will “install” their “package” and replace any previously written JavaScript code (the dojo stuff comes to mind here). The moo.fx approach is the most comfortable to me so far… but Google’s AJAXSLT is a very novel thing in spite of its relative ‘bigness.’