AJAX may be the biggest waste of time for the Web
Daniel Cazzulino says "AJAX is OLD. It's been around for a decade. It's based on the techniques that exist almost since the web exploded: HTML, Javascript. Both have served the Web well. Both are bound to die.Seriously: do you really want to develop rich apps using loads of javascript, XML and HTML manipulations? Isn't that more or less what you have been doing for the past decade? And a decade in internet time is a LOT of time! I don't think the future of the web lives in HTML and forms and javascript. The future of the web should be fully inmersive 3D worlds where you can hang around, look at things, interact with other people/buyers, etc."
A Huge Amen! I can't believe people are buying this stuff in a futile attempt to be Google. Why use Javascript and HTML crap when you can have a real MVC environment with Ruby on Rails for instance? I spent most of the 90's slingling this Javascript and HTML stuff and its hugely unproductive. What I mean here, is of course Ruby on Rails (and other frameworks) use and generate JavaScript and HTML but you don't usually program at that level. You have a nice Object-Oriented Domain model along with a framwork that promotes good practices like MVC which is very hard to do with JS itself. I still agree with Daniel that a better paradigm is needed. I personally believe in SmartClients myself but something like Flash (which is old and problematic) or more like XAML/Avalon is needed to get a better experience with lot less effort.
