Enter the WEB"> Enter the WEB
On his site, Joel on Software, Joel Spolsky writes a very interesting article about How Microsoft Lost the API War. If you have about 20 minutes I recommend the read as it is a good spent time.
In this article he describe the wrong turn taken by Microsoft with it’s Windows API. The less experienced self has to agree with him as also had to implement an application in .NET and had to decide as a beginner (I’m primarily a Java developer) what I should learn from the whole suite of .NET languages (decided to go with C#).
I have some additions to the Enter the WEB part of the article.
Quote:
But there’s a price to pay in the smoothness of the user interface. Here are a few examples of things you can’t really do well in a web application:
- Create a fast drawing program
- Build a real-time spell checker with wavy red underlines
- Warn users that they are going to lose their work if they hit the close box of the browser
- Update a small part of the display based on a change that the user makes without a full roundtrip to the server
- Create a fast keyboard-driven interface that doesn’t require the mouse
- Let people continue working when they are not connected to the Internet
These are not all big issues. Some of them will be solved very soon by witty Javascript developers.
I want to say this: Enter the AJAX.
AJAX is not the universal solution for all this but it solves some of the problems. Ajax allows for a web application to update only a part of the display. And it can (at least partially) create a keyboard-driven interface.
For the last (and I think) the most important feature, offline working, a new candidate has emerged Flex 2.0 from Adobe. It’s Data Service provides also that among other nice features.
And in fact Microsoft did responded to the threat: Atlas: Microsoft’s Ajax toolkit.
