Declarative Ajax and The next stage of Ajax
Ajax has certainly caught the attention of everyone. Signficant amount of progress has been made in the last 10 to 12 months. As of today, there are probably over 100 Ajax toolkits/frameworks (some are open source, some are close source). On the one side, it is truely amazing and exciting that we have rich choices. On the other side, we all know the market should not and would not want 100 options.
It is time for all of us to evaluate and start to converge onto a few leading offerings. In the end, the market should rally around thee to five leading Ajax toolkits, preferrably all open source, with a few additional “niche” offerings.
In addition, the market would need a solution or approach that can tie these various options together and leverage them. This would the declarative approach to Ajax. Ajax programming using Javascript is simply too hard. Ajax Toolkit are helpful but still too hard. The declarative approach would enable developers to code ajax application using mainly XML instead of hard coding JavaScript. The XML would be rendered in the browsers as rich UI by leveraging some of these Ajax toolkits.
Let's do not forget Microsoft Atlas. It contains UI widget/toolkit, a declarative layer on top of the UI/toolkit, and of course, IDE integration into Visual Studio. Atlas will certainly be a significant force in the Ajax world. In fact, no other offering would be anywhere close to be able to compete against Atlas. There are a few other close source alternatives today but i don't believe anyone of them would reach a critical mass as Atlas. In fact, i believe Atlas is the only viable offering in the Ajax world –unless….
Unless the entire open source world collectively bring innovations together and be able to offer something credible in comparsion with Atlas. In the end, it would take an entire community from many companies to be able to compete against Microsoft Atlas, which is of course biased toward Microsoft ASP.NET on the server. What do we have today? We have lots lots of Ajax toolkits/framework, we can potentially have a good IDE (OpenAjax), we are missing the declarative layer…and our open source world is very fragmented and confusing at this moment.
The next stage of Ajax would clearly be a period of time that the market would gradually rally around a few Ajax toolkits (others would disappear or fall into nich positions), a declaratve framework and open development environment/tools to aid Ajax development and maintenace.
Here is what i see the marketing is going to and eventually would converge towards:
- Open Source:
- Ajax Toolkits:
- Apache Kabuki (Zimbra)
- Dojo
- A few others here?
- Declarative Ajax: ?
- Ajax development tool: Eclipse OpenAjax
- Ajax Toolkits:
- Close source: Microsoft Atlas – the one and the only one in the close source world.
BTW: Scott Dietzen's blog on this subject is certainly worthy of reading(http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/2005/10/ajax_programmin.html).
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Anonymous
