On the Stre@m

As the AJAX is the buzz word of the day more and more developers are looking for a good tool for developing an AJAX application. But what are the tool’s features to be considered an AJAX development tool.

First let see an “AJAX ready” tools’ list, in no particular order:

• Open AJAX group backed by BEA, IBM, Google, Oracle, Mozilla, Red Hat, Eclipse, and more. This is actually not a tool yet, is only an initiative but is worth keeping an eye on it.
• Sun Studio Creator 2
• MyEclipse 4.1 was released with Ajax support
• IntelliJ IDEA
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 - they are planing an add-on layer to ASP.NET but only for Atlas.
• Eclipse WTP
• JSEclipse from InterAKT

As we can see from the list, anyone that has a name in a WEB development related bussiness has jumped into the wagon.

From all this major players you may be wandering why I have included JSEclipse. Will see about that later.

What have come to my attention is that all this tools are AJAX ready because all have a JavaScript editor. There are too few other features to make one tool better in the AJAX development (I will not include here Visual Studio as I did not tested it yet).

Sun Studio Creator comes with AJAX JSF Components a library of AJAX components. This seems to be a nice addition.

So, with respect to JavaScript editing, JSEclipse seems to be a very good tool:

http://www.andrewwooldridge.com/blog/2006/02/jseclipse-powerful-javascript-editor.html
http://ajaxian.com/archives/jseclipse-javascript-editor-with-code-completion

Right now the AJAX tools market is new and while developers are still trying to figure out what web 2.0 is and how AJAX can help them to implement a web 2.0 application, the tool developers are also in a foggy place (just have come out of the dark) trying to understand the needs of their clients. What is certain is that AJAX means JavaScript and XML and while the XML will be generated by the server, the JavaScript must be written by somebody and that somebody will need a good JavaScript editor. That is how far the tool makers have gone. It is also sure that they will not stay here. This is only a transit station and the first one to arrive at destination will write history (aka “MAKE THE BIG BUCKS”).