Software Development from Ryan

Ajax is a bit of a browser hack.  Isn’t it one of these Web 2.0 trends that are going to eventually fade away into obscurity?  You would think it would be gone by now in the same way we’ve found better solutions for things like frame sets and animated gifs. But it’s not. People have embraced websites that use Ajax.  It’s not that they’re simply attracted to the latest technology.  Most people don’t know that browsers aren’t meant to do these Ajaxy things. For that matter do most people even know what Ajax is? Mostly no.

As software developers our intuition tells us to build something that does the same thing with different technology, something more elegant. But the reality is people love the internet and their web browser. There’s a sense of safety (browsing compared to installing software), and infinite content. It seems that we need to suck it up and see what we can do with this Ajax thing.

Progress has been made over the last couple years to deal with this software development problem starting with quality frameworks started to popup like Prototype, Ext, and Dojo. Then we started to see better tools. The tool I’ve been most impressed with for Ajax software development is the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) since it lets you leverage software engineering tools from Java.  At this point I think we have this Ajax thing handled pretty well. Frameworks have abstracted the limitations of the browser allowing us to focus on writing application code with a solid foundation. Software engineering tools now provide us with the proper environment to scale our development process and application complexity.

So what’s next? Let’s nail performance…

Google’s open social has a web page now and it looks like a fairly straightforward technology to use. I’ll definitely play around with it a little bit. Unfortunately it’s not quite ready with the social networks. Only a few of the networks listed support it today including Orkut, Plaxo, and Ning. It sounds like Facebook may even support it even though Google left them in the dark.

This is a pretty big API announcement for Google. Probably the biggest over the past year or so. It supports standard web technology, which means you can build sophisticated apps using GWT too. It’s a very good move by Google and helps with their image of being open and not evil (although supporting MySpace and not talking with Facebook looks pretty bad). They even held an little event called Campfire to announce the API. Campfire is Google’s attempt at a Barcamp/FooCamp/DemoCamp style unconference, but unfortunately it had that fake corporate video/infomercial feel instead.