Web, AJAX slammed for deficiencies
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(InfoWorld) - The Web and AJAX have many deficiencies, including security holes, and much more needs to be done to iron out these problems, according to a keynote speaker at The Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday evening After taking the audience through a history of computing interfaces beginning with Hollerith cards to time-sharing and finally to the Web, Douglas Crockford, an architect at Yahoo and creator of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), gave a mostly gloomy presentation on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and the Web. His presentation was entitled, "The State of AJAX." "The sad thing was the Web was a step backward in terms of interactivity [when it debuted]," Crockford said. It looked like Java would fix the problem with applets. "Unfortunately, Java was a huge failure. It completely collapsed. It didn't meet any of its goals," he said. Java's write-once, run-everywhere promise was not kept; it had an unworkable security model and a tedious UI model, said Crockford. Java did, however, become very successful on the server, he added. This left JavaScript and then XMLHTTP requests for communicating from the browser to the data server. "It was really Microsoft that created all the components that AJAX needed," Crockford said. AJAX applications are highly interactive, highly social, easy to use, and offer great network efficiency, according to Crockford. "The big problem is that it is too damn hard to write these apps," he said. "The most interesting innovation in software development in 20 years has got to be the mashup," which shows the benefits of distributed programming. "Unfortunately, mashups are insecure [in the browser]," said Crockford, with components unable to be protected from each other. The model in the browser is fully broken and needs to be fixed, he said. "The Web is an exploit waiting to happen," Crockford said. Crockford then went through a critique of various Web technologies. "[JavaScript is a] deeply flawed language," with an unpopular programming model. "But to its credit, it's working really, really well in an environment where Java failed," said Crockford. The planned JavaScript 2 upgrade also has problems. "It will make the language considerably more complicated," Crockford said. HTML raises questions about whether it is a document format or an application delivery format; it has low graphical ability and is missing a compositing model. With AJAX, HTML needs to be an application delivery format, said Crockford. XHTML was supposed to replace HTML, but it died because it was too brittle, he said. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) presents a styling layer in the browser, but it is slow, complex, and incredibly fragile. "It surprises me that there is not a greater call for its replacement," Crockford said. XML is complicated and inefficient, he said. "Fortunately, XML has been replaced by JSON," Crockford said. "This gives me some confidence that we can fix the standards in the Web. This is our first success at that." Crockford urged standardization and uniformity in browsers. But there are computers not capable of running the latest browsers, he said.Â  If the Web is unable to repair itself, it could be replaced with a proprietary system such as Microsoft's Silverlight or Adobe's AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), Crockford said. Proprietary systems do present advantages, such as having only one source of new bugs and presenting a simpler upgrade story. But people like open systems and are suspicious of proprietary systems, he said. Crockford added that he used to think the browser was the most hostile programming environment ever devised, but then he found out about mobile programming. The mobile industry has had its own failed experiments, he said. "Despite all of its problems, AJAX works. So we're looking at a mobile Web now," Crockford said. Fixing the many issues might just require a lack of democracy, in which the right players are placed in the same room and agree on a remedy, similar to how the U.S. Constitution was forged, he said. "Maybe we should do that, too, but who are the right guys and how do you figure out how to get everybody else not to revolt," Crockford said. Earlier on Thursday, Kevin Hoyt, platform evangelist with Adobe Systems, emphasized the concept of experience as critical for Web development. Experience matters to business, he stressed. He spoke of an experience economy as a successor to the current service economy. "Seventy-two percent of shopping carts abandoned because of poor user experience," Hoyt said. He also urged developers not to disregard what they learned from developing desktop applications when they start building for the Web. It is OK to use desktop metaphors in Web apps, such as widgets, he said. "It's OK to think inside the box," said Hoyt. Customers, he said, want a personal relationship with a brand.SEE ALSO:Rich Web technologies debated
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With a bit of a rebuttal for Harry Fuecks' statement that PHP has a great lack of international support comes this new posting from John Lim at PHPEverywhere.
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The web's standards body makes recommendations for software developers so all of the pieces of the web can work together. But critics argue that strict adherence to these standards is stifling innovation now that new technology is reaching the web with greater speed.
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A persistent problem with the Web API is the Return-to-Sender issue. JavaScript is capable of alleviating it, but it's not always enabled by software vendors. By Jacques Surveyor. 1014
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Blog: As an industry we are terrible at working on interoperability.  The open source world should be the one to fix this.
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On PHPied.com, there's a new tutorial that combines the power of Ajax with the flexibility of PHP to create a more Ajax-centric version of an Model/View/Controller structure.    This is sort of a framework thing to create AJAX applications, based on the MVC design pattern. Yep, I have a lot of buzzwords here, I admit, but this shouldn't be taken too seriously. I was doing a bunch of small projects lately and I found myself using something like this little framework, without even thinking about it.    Then I thought about it and I found that the scripts and the organization of them may resamble MVC a bit. So how does MVC fit when you mix things like thin and fatter client, HTML, JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest, PHP and CSS?    He compares the "usual flow" of Ajax applications verus how an MVC-like app would work and shows a simple version of one in action. It uses PHP for the Model, Javascript/PHP for the Controller logic, and strictly HTML/CSS/Javascript for the View to output to the user. He incorporates some of the Yahoo! UI functionality to help capture events and make the backend Ajax connection. His sample sends off an Ajax request to the PHP backend when the button is pressed and takes in the message (HTML) and pushed it back out into the current page.   The demo is here and you can download the source as well.
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AJAX Toolkit Framework upgrade to help consolidate frameworks and extend supported browsers.
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Joshua Eichorn has posted this new tutorial to his site today, a detailed look at how to add Ajax to just about any site out there with the help of the HTML_AJAX PEAR package.    When looking at a adding AJAX you have a couple decisions you'll want to make up front. One is what tools your going to use. In the webthumb case thats pretty easy. Webthumb is a simple PHP app and doesn't use a framework, so I need a nice general PHP/AJAX framework that is easy to use, HTML_AJAX fits that need.   After picking my tools I need to decide what my goals are. My main focus will be to improve usability, but I also want to use AJAX to make the site seem a bit flashier, so its a bit of a technology demo too.    He uses his own current project, Webthumb as an illustration of his points including looks at remoting, a RequestStatus class, exporting a class with the HTML_AJAX package, and finally, making the Ajax calls.
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Lorenzo Alberton is back today with another tutorial dealing with the PEAR::Pager class. This time, he focuses on using it with some simple Javascript and Ajax.    Not everyone has jumped on the (Ajax) bandwagon, though, and many libraries still exist without implementing this feature, so you're faced with the dilemma: should I keep using that old library and give up my cool AJAX ideas, or should I implement my own version?   If you're looking for a pager class with these requisites, I'm happy to reassure you about PEAR::Pager: it is AJAX-ready, and has been since a long time ago. 100% buzzword-compliance guaranteed!    He gives two examples of what he means - one just using the Pager package to create Javascript lists and divide them into paginated chunks and the other to work with an Ajax connection (via PEAR::HTML_AJAX) to grab the data and push it into a container DIV on the page.
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AJAX lets you give your Web site a cool, slick user interface. But there are downsides. Find out the best ways to manage potential AJAX woes, in this excerpt from Enterprise Ajax.
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A new posting from Dynamically Typed - More on rich web UIs - has a few interesting links to share, as well as Harry's search for a XmlHttpRequest method.
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PHPKitchen has an interesting post covering one of the banes of most web developers existance - the "back button problem".
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The recently rediscovered Ajax technique makes the client side of web programming much more useful and pleasant. However, it also means revising your existing web applications to take advantage of this new power. Dominic Mitchell shows how to use CGI::Ajax to give your Perl applications access to this new power.
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Data exchange format is just too slow, some say. But there's debate over the best way to make Extensible Markup Language fly.
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Joshua Eichorn talks in his latest blog post today about a specific question he's answered about his PEAR package, HTML_AJAX, over on it's wiki site. It was something he gets asked a lot, so he thought he'd post it here as well.    I answered an FAQ question tonight on the HTML_AJAX wiki, im posting the answer here as well since I know most people don't check the wiki for changes every day.  Outside of this answer I'd like to hear from what other libraries people would like too see integrated with HTML_AJAX and the reasons for this.  Question: Will HTML_AJAX integrate with other Javascript AJAX libraries such as scriptaculous? How would this integration look like?    He answers that there are no specific plans to work towards integration with those sorts fo libraries, mainly for dependency issues. He notes that merges like that should be taken care of at a "higher level" than his package would deal with anyway. There is the functionality, however, to load in external Javascript libraries (general).
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Hoping to spur development of Web sites using the AJAX development platform, Google on Tuesday released the Google Web Toolkit. The platform would allow those with knowledge of Java to create browser compliant JavaScript and HTML easily.
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They are slick and gaining popularity, but voice over internet protocol and AJAX have some big security problems that will probably get worse before they get better. Quinn Norton reports from San Diego.