AJaX: promise or hype .. or both?

mrG — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 17:32:13 -0400

What's with all this AJaX jazz? I'm not going to deny that a lot of the current surge in articles has much to do with Google-envy and on technologists bent on the beauty of their weapons more than anything demonstrably practical, but what strikes and amuses me most in these erupting discussions is the stark duality. It's tacit and assumed, black vs white, is it or is it not, the Dark Side or the Good.

But is it really? As one of those who explored primative models of these method as far back as Y2K, I'll chime in the frey with a heretical idea:

It depends.

Whither to AJaX or not, it all depends entirely on your intentions.

Right now Ajax hangs in the balance. Reasoning from the articles and blog entries that are available today, Ajax could be either a promise or a hype. That makes me lean to the hypey side, because I feel that if something "could be a hype" it probably is.
[ QuirksBlog: Ajax, promise or hype? ]

Where there's polarity, there's typically a grain of dual-space truth, and that's where I place these dynamic interface applications. In 2000, Paul Kelly and I created a tightly bound fleet of kiosk tradeshow booth display clients, using DHTML and Javascript timer-refresh to simulate the interior workings of the OpenCola products, using iFrame and data transfer to update small elements, all in the name of giving an illusion of the eventual desktop application. Therein a clue: the medium was the message.

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AJaX: promise or hype .. or both?