AJAX, and more AJAX, that’s what we’ve been hearing about. Some call it the savior of the web application. Some say that it will kick Microsoft butt into oblivion. Web apps will be king, desktops are dead. Long live the king!
So you decide to look into AJAX and find out that it is a combination of various technologies, DHTML, java script and others that allow web applications to be written that look and feel more like desktop apps. Technologies that have been around for years but are finally being combined in meaningful ways. The key is asynchronous callbacks to the server from the browser. Talking to the server without forcing postback of the page. That’s what it is.
Why the sudden buzz? One factor — someone came up with a name (AJAX) that we can us to described the combination of tools. Second factor– browser support for dhtml and JavaScript has reach critical mass. Virtual all browsers support the pieces need make the async calls work.
I spent a pleasant hour tonight talking with Russ Helfand (Microsoft). He was demonstrating Atlas and ASP.NET and we spent a lot of time contrasting AJAX and Atlas. I was impressed. Atlas is much more the a Microsoft re-branding of AJAX. It is a powerful combination of async script calls (what AJAX does) and excellent integration with your ASP.NET server code. Hey you can write Atlas code and not have any dependencies on ASP.NET. Isolated HTML pages can harness the power of Atlas. But there is also a binding mechanism for client side controls (bindable to webservices too). Plus, as I said before, tight integration with ASP.NET if you want.
I’m tired, spent all day at the MVP summit, filling my head with new ideas. I’m not sure if I’m doing a good job of explaining Atlas so let me say this. Check out the samples. Realize that this is still an very early prototype of Atlas and Russ and his coworkers are still designing the architecture.