You Say You Want a Web Revolution
By Ryan Singel
Wired News
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68403,00.html
02:00 AM Aug. 05, 2005 PT
The Netscape threat that led Microsoft to wage the browser war and cross
swords with antitrust regulators around the world is -- at long last --
poised to become reality.
Software experts say recent innovations in web design are ushering in a new
era for internet-based software applications, some of the best of which
already rival desktop applications in power and efficiency. That's giving
software developers a wide open platform for creating new programs that
have no relation to the underlying operating system that runs a PC.
Evidence of this evolution has been popping up everywhere in recent months,
with examples that include Google's online map rendering software and its
Gmail service, Amazon's A9 search engine and NetFlix's DVD rental platform.
All highlight a dramatic rethinking of web applications, using a
programming technique dubbed AJAX (for asynchronous JavaScript and XML)
that significantly improves how web pages interact with data, for the first
time rivaling programs that run natively on the desktop.
"For a user it is fundamentally different -- it feels like a real
application," said Rael Dornfest, chief technology officer for O'Reilly Media.
AJAX overcomes a severe limitation in traditional web interfaces, which
must reload anytime they try to call up new data. By contrast, AJAX lets
users manipulate data without clicking through to a new page, Dornfest
said. That's putting an end to page refreshes and other interruptions that
have handicapped wweb-based applications until now.
Web developers are creating AJAX code libraries and conventions to ease the
burden of making applications that speak several computer languages. Even
Microsoft is getting into the game, albeit with hooks that aim to keep it
tethered to its Windows OS. The company recently announced it is developing
its own AJAX toolbox, called Atlas, for web developers who use Microsoft's
ASP.NET technologies to build websites.
Perhaps the best known example of AJAX is Google Maps, whose improbable
drop shadows and absurdly movable maps spread shock and awe among web
developers in February.
Jesse James Garrett, a co-founder of the Adaptive Path consulting firm gave
AJAX its name in an influential essay.
"The deep trend here is that we are really starting to figure out what the
web is good for," he explained in an interview with Wired News. "This is
the web coming into its own as a medium for software applications."
According to Garrett, designers of the first generation of web applications
relied on the model of desktop software, and then dumbed them down to fit
in a browser. Gmail, the Google webmail service released last year,
awakened Garrett and many others to the possibility of a new style of web
applications.
"Everyone thought the story of web user interface for e-mail ended in
1999," Garrett said. "Then Google comes along five years later and says
'There is more we can do here,' and demonstrated it in an uncompromising
way -- not relying on Flash but simply using browser-native technologies
and pushing them as far as they can go."
While Microsoft wants to be part of the AJAX revolution, its major focus
for developers is on helping them build lively, multimedia Windows desktop
applications for its next operating systems.
To that end, Microsoft included a user interface development tool called
Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly codenamed Avalon) in last week's
release of a small batch of test versions of Vista, its long-delayed
successor to Windows XP.
Atlas, Microsoft's AJAX equivalent, won't likely be shown to web developers
before the company's developer conference in September.
Though Microsoft may have created the foundations of AJAX in the late 1990s
when it introduced the XMLHttpRequest API in Internet Explorer, and created
the first AJAX application (an e-mail client for business customers on the
go), the future of applications is on the desktop, according to Forest Key,
a Microsoft group product manager.
"While AJAX is clearly improvement over less rich HTML stuff, it is really
just a step in direction, in terms, in what users want to experience," Key
said. "AJAX is nothing compared to what is coming."
"We recognize the need in certain scenarios for browser-based,
standards-based stuff and that's where we have ATLAS technology, which is
going to simplify the development of AJAX content," Key said, "But when you
are talking about richness and fullness and really doing amazing things
that approach cinematic user interfaces, you are going to need a richer
technology, and that's what Windows Presentation Foundation is all about."
Key thinks that Vista's capabilities, combined with powerful and intuitive
development tools for both the desktop and the web, are going to lead to
the death of unproductive, non-intuitive computer interfaces.
"If you fast forward five years, you are going to see a huge shift in that
consumers and business users will expect and demand richness and fullness
in all applications," Key said.
Experts say they don't expect AJAX will make desktop applications obsolete.
But it has already affirmed the viability of the web as a standalone
software development platform.
"This is going to go a long way towards eliminating the user interface
insults and injuries we have suffered since we moved to the web,"
O'Reilly's Dornfest said. "Now people these days expect it to be flat so
they might be a little surprised (by AJAX applications). But the rest of us
see AJAX and say 'Ahh, this is what it is supposed to be like.'"
================================
George Antunes, Political Science Dept
University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204
Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927
antunes at uh dot edu
Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post.
_______________________________________________
MEDIANEWS mailing list
[email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
