AJAX: The Java Killer?

[J.Pluta]

Tomorrow's iTechnology Manager will publish an article on AIRPort, my new Open Source AJAX/Portal tecnology. It includes two complete, working applications that can be imported into WDSC and fired up in seconds. And while the included version uses JSP and servlets, the architecture is complete browser-, platform- and server- independent. You can use JSP, RPG-CGI, PHP, you name it. In fact, even the included applications are different; one is JSP Model I, one is JSP Model II. Joe

[H.Boldt]

Joe: A Google search on ajax portal turned up a number of interesting things, including several cool sites that currently combine AJAX with portals, as well as some AJAX Portal toolkits (such as AjaxPortal). I'm sure your article covers this question, but I doubt if I'll get around to reading it, so perhaps you could provide a summary here: How does your AIRPort compare to other AJAX Portal tools (some of which have been around for ages)? Cheers! Hans

[H.Boldt]

When learning any new technology, it's vitally important to understand how not to use it. Check out this Ajax Mistakes page. Cheers! Hans

[J.Pluta]

Good old Hans, still the curmudgeoniest person I've ever met. Since you won't bother reading my article, why would I bother responding to your post? Well, probably because I'm a lot nicer than you... Anyway, I do cover this, and in particular I cover the fact that what is currently called a portal today really isn't very useful for business applications. JSR-168, the current standard for portals, is vague on even the most basic requirements, including the simple ability to easily send data from one view to another. Today's portals are really little more than collections of independent mini-browsers, with a rather formidable framework built around letting the user select them and stack them and move them. This is entirely appropriate for My Yahoo, and far less useful for an order entry inquiry. This additional administration is typically specific to the tool vendor and often proprietary, as in the case of AjaxPortal (not to mention that their demo doesn't work). Thus, what is today called a portal is primarily an administrative tool (usually proprietary) for generating multi-pane dynamic web sites without any real business capabilities. The AIRPort architecture is about the essentials of business applications. You create a simple HTML page with areas you wish to fill with dynamic data. A tag in each hole, and a single line of JavaScript to fill the hole. The request is simple and NOT bound to any framework or language or server, and it's child's play to have additional JS calls in your generated HTML to in turn fill other views (even to other application servers). I'm sure we'll include examples in other languages as time goes on, but this initial version has both JSP Model I and JSP Model II versions which you can load into WDSC and test TODAY. It's Open Source and the entire code base is less than 100 lines of JavaScript and no Java other than the application itself for the JSP Model I framework. The JSP Model II version requires about 40 lines of controller code. Note: the Java application code for each application is trivial, but so are the applications, that's sort of the point. In any case, none of the AJAX portals is anything like what I'm proposing. Check it out. Joe P.S. Just in case you change you mind and actually decide to read something, I've already written one article on the subject: http://www.mcpressonline.com/mc?1@23...T.17@.6b37286c

[H.Boldt]

Joe wrote: "Good old Hans, still the curmudgeoniest person I've ever met." Curmudgeoniest? I won't argue that point! ;-) I read most things you write here. And I think I've read every article on Ajax here. I just had a brain-cramp - I didn't realize that "Tomorrow's iTechnology Manager" referred to something on this web site! Actually, I'm rather surprised that you and Bob have jumped on the Ajax bandwagon. Normally, most i fans seem to be on the trailing edge of new technology, preferring to see what shakes out after others blaze the new trails. To me, Ajax still seems at the "show me" stage, where lots of interesting and cool things are happening but little of substantial value in general. Ajax does indeed have a place in some areas (I'm a big fan of Google Maps!), but like many other things, there's the potential for overuse or even misuse. Likewise, to me, portals seem like overkill too. In my usual web browsing, I rarely encounter portal sites. The way I figure, if I want to look at multiple sites at one time, I can open multiple browser windows or tabs. Perhaps there's some kind of synergy that comes from the combination of the two? Using Ajax to implement portals does seem like a natural combination. On the other hand, if there's a potential to misuse Ajax, the potential risks with both together must be studied very carefully. Anyways, I do look forward to reading further. I am quite willing to be convinced that Ajax+portals has a place in business applications. But for now, this curmudgeon remains skeptical. Cheers! Hans

[J.Pluta]

Excellent! I'll be most interested in your take on the situation. Like you, I really didn't see much in AJAX except for some nice-to-have enhancements to the UI which could easily be misused. In fact, I wrote in one post that I predict AJAX to be the single most misused technology in the next six months ... that ought to be long enough for some OTHER nifty-keen thing to come along. I am not, however, on the "AJAX bandwagon". I'm not talking about using AJAX for asynchronous updates of widgets, regardless of how useful that particular niche may be. I'm talking about using AJAX as a way to overcome some of the inherent limitations of basic portal technology. For example, most portals requires you to rebuild the entire page in order to repaint one view; AJAX is an obvious way to get around that. More important, though, is the ability to send data from one view to another. By removing all of the overhead of a standard portal tool, it's very easy to concentrate on a set of standards for communicating betweens the views via the URL. It turns out ot be extremely easy in a JSP/servlet environment because all the AJAX views share the same HTTP session. I haven't yet tried the same thing with other server-side languages like RPG-CGI and PHP, but I hope to do so in the near future. Joe

[eric@bcdsoftware.com]

Hey Chris, I'll be happy to give you more AJAX links if it would help you. AJAX is moving along fast and the more iSeries developers know about it the more robust their iSeries - Web applications will become. You have my number, call me off line and I'll be happy to show you some incredible applications our clients have created with our tool and AJAX. Best regards, Eric Figura, BCD

[j_erps]

Its nice to read another article from Cozzi again with really useful info again, so unbiased, NOT! Ajax the Java killer..... Well, Java wont go away, mr Cozzi, instead take some responsibility because you're well-known and have some influency. Try to give some good, unbiased info so that your audience will learn something. Telling each time how java sucks and is a fad etc etc wont help the as/400 (as if anything can help it now). Java is pervasive, very succesful etc etc, and saying that AJAX is some kind of java-killer is just a plain stupid thing to say, because the two are quite different. But i wont elaborate on Java being succesful, i think you know that already. But you didnt invented it yourself, and Java is of course a replacement for RPG, and RPG is your way of earning a living. Everyone is entitled to an opinion of course, but dont use some kind of influence to try to "steer" your audiance in some direction you would like (ie rpg is good, java is bad, and, by the way, xTools is also good, and everything else that can help you to portrait java as being a bad option for the as/400 programmer). And thats a shame, because if the average RPG programmer would have learned some really useful stuff, some years ago, like java, then the as/400 might have some future. Instead, you have to look at AJAX as some kind of user interface, nothing more, like we have traditional webpages, Swing/SWT. I think AJAX has a great future, just because its nothing new or revolutionary, but a set of existing techniques gaining more importance and solving some real problem. Ie how to create a nice web userinterface, using existing techniques supported in each browser. And HTML and Javascript is supported by every browser, which is the "pervasive" argument of you. But to say that Java is not pervasive is an outright lie, because it is pervasive on the server-side, just like HTML and Javascript is pervasive on the client-side. And, by the way, its also available on every single platform you can think of. Unlike HTML and Javascript, which is only available from within a web browser. You can better say that the webbrowser is pervasive. Anyhow, java is the most pervasive programming technology available nowadays. Its just not a standard component of every webbrowser, you indeed have to download a JVM. And why is this? This has a history and a reason (microsoft etc) which is well known, so i dont elaborate on this. It would be better when you tried to educate your audiance a bit by saying that ajax is nothing more than a user-interface technology based on HTML, Javascript and asynchronous communication. As some proof that saying ajax is a java killer (its even the title of your article) is just plain stupid is the recently released google web toolkit (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit). With this toolkit its possible to easily create a web-app using ajax technology by creating pure java code. The GWT handles generating the messy HTML/Javascript for you. Because yes, HTML/Javascript is messy. Javascript is not a industrial-strength language, and you have to deal with all kinds of browser incompatibilities, which is a great pain when developing web-apps using HTML and Javascript. Also, there aren't many good tools to do Javascript development, like a good debugger. And another great advantage of java is that it is a clean, rich language, with many good tools etc etc, and it's also very compatible on all those platforms. So using this toolkit is like using some new user-interface technology for java, just like Swing or SWT. And i think that in the end java will just get more popular, because you can now build a web-app using industrial strength development tools, without all the incompatibility mess, but with the advantages of the pervasiveness of a HTML/Javascript user interface. Of course, it would help a lot to know java....