It’s not often than a media buzzword can make you start to really dislike a technology or technique – but everytime I read or hear “Web 2.0″ I want to tear out every single AJAX enhanced feature of IP.Dynamic and weep quietly in the corner.
Don’t get me wrong; I love what AJAX can do for web applications and used correctly it can solve many design problems that would be cumbersome without it. However, when I see people jump all over a new product or script just because it uses AJAX, I want to vomit. I remember someone showing me a WHOIS script that used AJAX to give the results inline. It wasn’t a very pretty or complicated script and an iframe or a page reload would have acheived the same result but as it used AJAX, it was being held aloft as another shining example of why Web 2.0 is a revolution.
Josh sent me a link this morning which sums up my feelings in a much more eloquent manner than I can muster:
Steven, a young web wiz, has just celebrated his bar mitzvah. He received a dozen gifts and must write a dozen thank-you notes. Being webbish, he creates an on-line “Thank-You Note Generator.” Steven shows the site to his friends, who show it to their friends, and soon the site is getting traffic from recipients of all sorts of gifts, not just bar mitzvah stuff.
If Steven created the site with CGI and Perl and used tables for layout, this is the story of a boy who made a website for his own amusement, perhaps gaining social points in the process. He might even contribute to a SXSW Interactive panel.
But if Steven used AJAX and Ruby on Rails, Yahoo will pay millions and Tim O’Reilly will beg him to keynote.
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Interesting. I read that article just yesterday
And yes, I agree that just because something uses AJAX doesn’t make it good, but I dislike the people who shun it just because it’s become a buzzword as well.
I highly reccommend you read the comments/discussion for that article.
That is so true! I even stumbled upon some webapps that had AJAX in their name while they only have something like livesearch or GMail-style ’stars’ or something like that.
It’s pretty sad, but it usualy happens in the offline world too: most people say ‘if it looks good, it has te be good’ while that is quite often not the case (unless it’s a product from a certain company in Cupertino
It has irritated me to no end recently too; people on support forums whining “Why can’t this be done with AJAX?”. I wish they’d have kept it to good ol’ XMLHTTP Requests and then it wouldn’t have been such an annoying buzzword.
I very much agree with Matt. but because it’s now a “buzzword” lets not forget that AJAX is still a good thing… even in its infancy. I’ve only begun tinkering with it myself, but as people begin doing good things with it, the buzz will die. Remember Intel processors with MMX? Nobody wanted a generic AMD with 3Dnow!… you had to have the MMX. And although this isn’t about branding, nobody knows or even gives a crap about MMX or 3Dnow! anymore. The AJAX buzz will die in its own due time.
As for the web 2.0 buzz which seems to be getting its high off of AJAX, I think web 2.0 is in for a rude awakening. One technology can’t possibly make up an entire an entire web and it won’t. If that’s its sole base it’ll die quicker than RDRAM.
Thanks Matt for giving programmers like you and myself a good name.
I believe this is the correct explanation of web 2.0:
http://www.parm.net/web2.0/
One of these days I’ll get around to adding AJAX to my form submission verification routines and simple search boxes I guess..
cheers,
leapius
Uh ^ ” http://www.parm.net/web2.0/ ” …
Bit OTT.. lol
Anyway, I do see what you mean about AJAX techniques being used everywhere and anywhere just for the sake of getting “Ooh’s” and “Aah’s” and generally looking “l33t”, but lets not forgot that as we are only transferring the required raw data, the data transfer is considerably lower..
Anyway, for things like a AJAX WHOIS lookup, seems very pointless because usually the results that would be returned would be very minute in size anyway, but meh
“but lets not forgot that as we are only transferring the required raw data, the data transfer is considerably lower..” If the XMLHTTP requests aren’t limited it increases data transfer and “can” be very inefficient.
^ Naturally, but, in small portions my point is valid
Ajax != Web 2.0, this kind of backlash is getting very tiring, more-so than the term Web 2.0 ever was.
This is exactly the point – people are labelling anything that uses fancy javascript as “AJAX” and anything that uses AJAX as “Web 2.0″.