Why Digg’s Ajax Icing with JQuery is only Half Good
Originally they had a touch of Ajax with their “digg” button where a click would submit your digg asynchronously to their server and update the digg count without a page refresh. This feature had been around for a long time and proved to be elegant and easily usable. Of course the lack of a page refresh also saves quite a bit of server bandwidth, but this performance optimization was shadowed by the features usability. Now, Digg.com has just added a little bit more Ajax icing to their traditional web app cake.
Basically what they have done is replaced the threaded comments with comments that are dynamically loaded when the user expands the list. All of the technical details are discussed by the implementor Joe Stump:
Probably the coolest, technically speaking, portion of the new comments is the manner in which most of the page is created. No longer do we create static HTML in PHP and send you a huge HTML page. Instead we give you the basics and, via AJAX/JSON, we make requests to the API and dynamically create the DOM using the FlyDOM jQuery plugin. The FlyDOM JSON templates are a stroke of genius if you’re looking at loading JSON dynamically into the DOM. The advantage of this is that initial page loads are much snappier and you can load the threads you wish to read on demand.
In simpler terms, Joe Ajaxified the comment system using the jQuery library. If you look past a lot of the technical coolness that Joe is talking about you’ll find that the greatest improvement here is performance based. Initial page loads are dramatically reduced by incrementally loading the page. If you look past any Ajax hype this performance improvement is half of the Ajax promise. The other half is usability. And although usability shined with the initial bit of Ajax on Digg.com’s digg button, digg members have declared this new comment system unusable.
In all fairness Digg.com is working actively on fixing the usability issues. It is clear however that usability in this instance came second, which is a mistake.
I work a lot with GWT building full Ajax applications. This is a bit different than Digg. In my case Ajax is the cake. The things that the GWT team does makes me happy. Seeing this Ajax issue at Digg reinforces that the GWT team is moving the project forward in the best direction. To understand this we can simply compare two quotes, one coming from JQuery and the other coming from GWT:
You start with 10 lines of jQuery that would have been 20 lines of tedious DOM JavaScript. By the time you are done it’s down to two or three lines and it couldn’t get any shorter unless it read your mind
Dave Methvin, JQuery front page
This sounds great to me. As a software developer I know the best code is no code. Or less is more. Digg.com made a good technical decision to use JQuery. But this is only half of the story and the half that developers usually tackle the best. Where is the other half?
We want great results, where “great” is defined by how much it benefits end users. Sometimes there are conflicts between what is easy for us developers and what benefits end users the most. When the two are in conflict, end user experience almost always wins.
I don’t think GWT would be the best solution for the Digg comment system since Digg just needed icing for their traditional web application. However, this is really the proper additude to have when developing applications that you want people to use.
Coincidently I’ve just finished writing a GWT example application that acts as an Ajax database administrator for a social news website like Digg.com. It’s a full Ajax application and the fifth example application in my book on GWT Applications. It illustrates how to dynamically load and save all data using JSON or XML on REST or Actions , or using GWT RPC…. basically a lot of server interaction techniques. Its tested on PHP scripts, Ruby on Rails, and a Java Servlet. Althought most of the technically interesting things are not visible, here is a somewhat underwelming screenshot of the applicaiton:
Adobe Apollo, now called AIR, (Adobe Integrated Runtime), the runtime environment that allows you to use existing web technology for apps on the desktop is an obvious next step from building desktop like Ajax applications that seem to be awkwardly confined to a browser window. The technology requires a runtime installation of approximately 10MB, similar to the need to install the Java or .NET runtime to run apps in these technologies. However, AIR stands apart by allowing you to develop your applications using web standard technologies. It also adds desktop application like features including storage on your hard drive.
Of course Microsoft sees this battle going on and wants a piece of the action. They have always had great development tools that have really pushed client application development on windows and are now trying to push web application development in the browser with its Silverlight plugin. Silverlight is a very interesting technology that supports a subset of the .NET framework. This means that it is like AIR providing better integration with OS features but differs by running in the browser. The download size is also a subset of the size of the .NET framework at approximately 10MB.
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