h1

Ajax transports still need to evolve

June 6th, 2006

Michael Mahemoff talks about Ajax transport layers and their problems.

In my Ajax Experience presentation last month, I covered all the available transport layers, their history, pros and cons, and provided some example code. My main intention in doing so was to demonstrate that there has been over 8 years of evolution of Ajax-related techniques to bring us to where we are, and to underline that Ajax is not a done deal, there is still work to be done.

The ReadyState 3 issue that Michael talks about has been well known (well, apparently not well known) at least since Scott Andrew LePera described the problem in late 2002. It really needs to be fixed.

Cross-domain issues also still need to be addressed. I spoke to Brendan Eich from Mozilla about this at the conference and he mentioned that there are other W3C specs that use access control lists, which may provide an existing base upon which to build an XMLHttpRequest ACL model. Laurel Reitman on the IE7 Team was also involved in discussions about this issue.

Douglas Crockford‘s JSONRequest proposal goes a long way towards suggesting solutions to the various limitations of the current state of available Ajax transport layers.

Jesse James Garrett communicated very clearly in his keynote that Ajax is no longer an acronym to be limited to its original initials. According to Jesse, as long as these two basic ingredients are involved, what you have is an Ajax application.

  • asynchronous interaction model
  • browser-native technologies

Hopefully, organizations like the new OpenAjax Alliance will be able to reach consensus on what needs to be done and how in order to take us to the next level in Rich Internet Application evolution.

4 comments to “Ajax transports still need to evolve”

  1. By “browser-native technologies,” does that also include things like XUL and XAML? If so, that makes me sad.


  2. […] Of course, none of this is really new, at least not to some people. Ajax pioneer Brent Ashley points out: The ReadyState 3 issue that Michael talks about has been well known (well, apparently not well known) at least since Scott Andrew LePera described the problem in late 2002. It really needs to be fixed. […]


  3. Your OpenAjax Alliance link is fried.


  4. […] Of course, none of this is really new, at least not to some people. Ajax pioneer Brent Ashley points out: The ReadyState 3 issue that Michael talks about has been well known (well, apparently not well known) at least since Scott Andrew LePera described the problem in late 2002. It really needs to be fixed. […]