Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

It's the Next Cool Thing, of course. Google used it for Google Maps and suddenly everybody wants to use it. Asynchronous Javascript and XML -- man, it's a cool name and it uses nested acronyms! You almost can't get any cooler than that.

And Google Maps is cool. The technology allows you to do some really neat stuff. But when I see people jumping wholesale into AJAX development for its own sake, I have to shake my head and wonder why we don't consider the tradeoffs more carefully first.

One of my friends just told me that he developed a login script in AJAX. "It doesn't even refresh the page!"

But where's the problem in a login script refreshing a page? We've created no advantage through this new technology. And we've introduced another technical requirement -- where anybody could login before, now users must have Javascript enabled.

I told him this and he readily agreed, of course. He was just testing the technology to play around. But it's that sort of mindset that seems to pervade all new technology -- let's use it because it's cool!

Google Maps was cool not because it uses AJAX, but because it uses technology to provide a really slick, intuitive interface in an application that requires a lot of interaction.

Flash, XML, AJAX, Javascript, Java... So much cool stuff that gets misused so badly. Developers create nonstandard user interfaces that are not as intuitive or slick as Google Maps. Users are left behind when they don't know how to install the latest plugins. Corporate firewalls disable otherwise useful sites. Net benefit = -5.

Let's never use technology because it's cool. Let's use it if it fills a specific need, or provides a benefit that outweighs the tradeoff.

ps > That said, AJAX is way cool! And remind me to post about reverse proxies and the astonishingly clever use of them I ran across last week... It's a secret, but I can talk about it in generalish terms. It's so cool it makes me feel all tingly inside. :o) (Which is a good measure of how geeky I am.)