Matevž Gačnik's Weblog

A fellow MVP, Daniel Cazzulino, has a post titled AJAX may be the biggest waste of time for the web. While I agree with most of the points there, one should think about what Microsoft is doing to lower the AJAX development experience boundary.

Having to deal with JavaScript, raw (D)HTML and XML is definitely not going to scale from the developer penetration perspective. Nobody wants to do this is 2006. Therefore if Atlas guys make their magic happen, this would actually not be neccessary. It they achieve what they started, one would be abstracted from client side programming in most of the situations.

<atlas:UpdatePanel/> and <atlas:ScriptManager/> are your friends. And they could go a long way.

If this actually happens then we are actually discussing whether rich web based apps are more appropriate for the future web. There are scenarios that benefit from all these technologies, obviously. And if the industry concludes that DHTML with XmlHttpRequests is not powerful enough, who would stop the same model to produce rich WPF/E code from being emitted out of an Atlas enabled app.

We have, for the most part, been able to abstract the plumbing that is going on behind the scenes. If it's server side generated code, that should be running on a client, and if it is JavaScript, because all browsers run it, so be it.

We have swallowed the pill on the SOAP stacks already. We don't care if the communication starts with a SCT Request+Response messages, following by the key exchange. We do not care that a simple request-response model produces 15 messages while starting up. We do not care that there is raw XML being transfered. After all, it is all a fog, doing what it is supposed to do best - hiding the abstraction behind our beautiful SOAP/Services stack API.