I came across an page talking about AHAH (Asynchronous HTML and HTTP). I’ve already done an article on this, but this one caught my eye because of his mention about security.

He makes an interesting observation about people with criminal intent. With Ajax a hacker only needs to fake a domain name once. He can then fake browser activity by using Ajax to “refresh” the entire HTML body. Can we say phishing? Before, the above average user could simply note a URL change from “wellsfargo.com” to “206.34.??.??” for instance. This would be a sufficient alert for most. With no browser redirects the world of attackers using Phishing seems to now be endless.

Just something more to keep in mind with new and developing technology. I’m sure as it increases in popularity developers with start to address these issues.

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Yakov Fain wrote an interesting article: A Cup of AJAX? Nay, Just Regular Java Please at SYS-CON DEUTSCHLAND.

I can agree that big Internet guys [Google] can and should invest some serious dough into supporting screen-refresh-on-mouse-move in HTML-based screens. But when it comes to a regular Intranet business application, when the users/browsers/platforms are known and when the cost of the project development matters, I’d stay with a fat client written in Java, or (if you like a fancy GUI) Macromedia’s Flash or Flex.

This article caught my eye and I’m including it simply for your perusal, but I disagree with him. For people who have been developing Java Applets for the past um-teen years, then this argument holds a lot of ground, however for people like myself Ajax is the perfect answer. The application that I am working on is primarily developed in C. The whole web application portion of the program is an add-on and soon needs to be automatically generated by the C application. Ajax opens the perfect door for this type of functionality.

I’m curious to hear what you all think. Java or Ajax?

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There has been a lot of buzz about this book, Ajax in Action. I do plan to buy it, or rather get my boss to purchase it for the office :), so I haven’t read it yet. Considering all the reviews it’s been getting, I’ve decided to alert you guys about it. Maybe one of you could purchase it and send me a review.

Happy Reading.

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Ok, by now I’m guess that we all know what Writely. It’s a wonderful little Web (AJAX) based word processor. Does almost everything that Microsoft Word does and even some things it doesn’t (PDF creation).

The guys over at TechCrunch have done an article on it. There have been many blogs entries on Writely, but this one struck me because of the comments on it. Some people are downplaying what the Writely team has produced here. It really urks me when people sit back and do nothing but criticize what others have done. The idea of a word processor hosted on a server is an exceptional one. People are saying that the Writely project is simple and doesn’t take more than “a couple days” to put together. If we look around, we’ll find that the most of the technology that enters the spot light is that which has been redone in a simpler, more effective way.

This is the challenge I have to all the negative critics, if the project is so simple and easy, why didn’t you think of it? Why aren’t you part of the development team?

We need to stop knocking on people with good ideas and simply commend them.

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I found this link somewhere, I can’t remember where. But Li Shen has packaged a nice AJAX wrapper called AJAX Client Engine (ACE). I downloaded it and took a look at it and I must say, it is quite functional. I took a look at his source code and found it to be relatively clean. It’s not too bulky making it a nice thin wrapper and he made it very object oriented. Here are a list of the properties. Visit the site to find one more about each of these:

• Object-oriented API.
• Cross-browser support.
• Request options.
• Request parameter validation.
• Callback arguments
• Callback options.
• Tracing service.
• Caching service.
• Polling service.
• Common callbacks.
• Exception handling.

There are some things I just love about this client. The tracing service: When this is enabled, a text area element in a new window (or in the same window if specified) is opened up and a debug is written. Basically, it tells you everything the AJAX client is doing. You can just insert the “trace” function call at various places where you need to debug information like when a request it made, when the AJAX states change, when a call is completed, etc. I must say, it is a very effective tool, one I should have come up with myself.

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With the way that Ajax applications have been developing, the questions of whether these applications can completely replace PC software comes to mind. Take Writely (online word processor) for instance:

”People are e-mailing document attachments in order to collaborate or else, in the enterprise world, they are attempting to use wildly expensive and complicated systems — the equivalent of trying to pound in a nail with a sledgehammer,” says Jen Mazzon, Writely’s vice president of marketing.

Her company’s service simplifies this ”by keeping track of a full revision history that includes who made what changes when, as well as by signaling to you who is co-editing with you at any given moment,” she says. ”Lastly, you can keep track of key changes made to the doc without even being in the doc, via an RSS feed that we enable.”

However, when implementing Ajax, developers need to understand it’s limitations. Bottom line is that Ajax is simply JavaScript and JavaScript performs horrible with large files. It all boils down to being just another script running from a browser. There is no way an application writing with a scripting language is going to effectively compete with one that is compiled.

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I came across an interesting article at CRM News that spoke a little’ bit about online shopping for this upcoming Christmas season.

RIAs are beginning to pop up all over the e-commerce world, with some notable examples being Gap, Nike (NYSE: NKE), and L.L. Bean. So far the use of AJAX and RIA in online retail tends to be limited to marketing “microsites,” usually built in Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR), which enable customers to explore a new product but not purchase it; and also for “guided selling” applications that provide some extra help in choosing the right product. But as the technologies have been maturing, a new generation of software vendors have emerged that specialize in building “Rich Internet Commerce” applications — RIA and AJAX applications specifically for the e-commerce world — which are beginning to paint a picture of what the future pageless Web may look like.

This article poses some questions:

1. How many companies are going to try to utilise and/or exploit Ajax on their shopping sites?
2. Are they going to do an effective job?
3. Will it meaningful and help customer experience or just bells and whistles?
4. Is the average consumer even ready for “all the hype”?

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I believe that I now need to rethink the Ajax sequence on the project I am working on for work. As it stands, I had to do some interesting tinkering to make things work and emulate the console side properly. A normal sequence of GETs and POSTs would have been sufficient, except I needed something to handle server pushes. In the console application, there are some instances like popup boxes. Eg. After the client sends a request to the server, the server sends back a simple popup box, sorting. After it is done sorting, the server sends back the information to the browser. And this is the problem. Normally, Ajax does not handle this. This is where I had to implement a modified polling technique.

Basically, the client makes constant requests to the server. Yes, yes, I know that this is very inefficient, but this is a rough draft. Well, rough working draft. The server sends back a NULL flag, which the browser reads and ignores, or it sends back the requested data. This works, but is very inefficient. Normally, server initiated Ajax routines use a polling technique. This involves the client basically pinging the server on regular intervals to request data. I’m doing the same thing but without the time delay.

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