RSSMicrosoft Kicks Off MIX 06 with 'Atlas'
By Nate Mook | Published March 20, 2006, 2:57 PM
Microsoft's MIX 06 conference in Las Vegas got underway Monday morning with Bill Gates using the opening keynote to highlight his company's renewed investment in the Web through development of new technologies and programs. At center stage was "Atlas," a new tool that simplifies the creation of AJAX-enabled sites using ASP 2.0.
The first public build of Atlas was delivered at PDC 2005 last year, and Microsoft made available a March CTP of Atlas on Monday. The latest release includes a "go-live license," which means developers can take into production their Atlas based applications and solutions.
"Despite AJAX getting headlines, it's not clear how many developers are actually using it," Tim O'Brien, group manager with platform strategy group, told BetaNews. "The real value of Atlas is extracting away all that complexity to make it very easy."
Indeed, Microsoft has long supported components of AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, within Internet Explorer dating back to its adoption of JScript, DHTML and XMLHTTP. But development using the AJAX approach has consisted of intensive scripting and what Microsoft deems as cobbling together of complementary technologies.
In addition, AJAX is beginning to gain traction in the enterprise and among leaders in the Internet space, O'Brien said, including Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft itself. At MIX 06, Microsoft has invited a number of these other companies; roughly half of the speakers are not Redmond employees.
"We think a lot of the discussion in the industry today is focused on the technology coolness and less on the business relevance," O'Brien said, noting that this is what differentiates MIX from other Web 2.0 conferences. "We're seeing the huge confluence of early adopter technologies like AJAX poised for broad business adoption."
The idea for hosting MIX has been a long time coming for Microsoft. The company began talking to Web developers starting with PDC 2003 and the introduction of XAML. "We conceived mix as a means to which we bring all these pieces together, while reaching out to this joint community of developers and designers," O'Brien explained.
Aside from Atlas, Microsoft issued a new "layout complete" build of Internet Explorer 7, along with a new build of Windows Live Messenger. Developers can test their sites and Web applications with this IE7 release without having to worry about rendering engine changes before the browser's release, O'Brien explained.
Although Microsoft expects the "conversation" to continue as this new generation of Web development tools and technologies emerge, the company is not planning another conference. Still, MIX has been a large endeavor for Microsoft, O'Brien said, with over 50 sessions and 30 hands-on labs.
"It's one of the largest Web conferences around," he noted. "We want attendees to walk away with a sense of our commitment to the Web platform and the Web space."
I just hope that they focus on making credible tools and libraries and stop worrying about proprietary lock-in. If this is truly open-standard stuff, it sounds very good.
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|Atlas sounds pretty good. Ajax sites are awesome, but can be very hard to develop. There are a couple of free libraries out there that simplify the process, but this will be super nice. I haven't messed around with it yet, but I hope that it is good.
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|Unfortunately, Microsoft is getting a little carried away with Atlas. Although it CAN simplify Ajax for Visual Studio 2005 developers (including people using the free Visual Studio Web Developer Edition), Microsoft has tried to accommodate too many different scenarios for partitioning app logic between browser and server, and the resulting pile of feature bloat is going to confuse people. This is already happening when you look at PHP/CFM/JSP people who look at Atlas and conclude that it's way too complicated; that's because Atlas is much more than Ajax, but it's explained in the context of ASP.NET 2.0 so you have to understand the environment and terminology first. A recent "round-up" article comparing Ajax frameworks and libraries was written by a PHP developer who was baffled by Microsoft's Atlas site and decided that Atlas must be IE-specific, Windows-specific, and/or require purchasing Visual Studio.
Even for existing ASP.NET developers, the down side of making things "easy" is that you allow developers to stay clueless about what is actually happening under the hood. They can get their apps working in demo/test, but if they run into an unusual situation in deployment or in production, they often have no idea what to do. This phenomenon will be common with Atlas.
My pet peeve example is the way Microsoft touts "any modern browser" compatibility in their bullet points, but nowhere in their documentation (not even the otherwise-good doc update released yesterday) does Microsoft admit that "any modern browser" apparently means IE, Firefox, and Safari. The only way to find this out is from digging into obscure code which you're not "supposed" to need to see. Once you get your hands this dirty, it's no longer an "easy" platform.
In fairness, there is a reason that Opera was left out: Despite great support for formal standards like CSS, Opera has had trouble with their implementation of XMLHttpRequest, a key piece of AJAX technology which was orignally an IE-specific feature, later adopted by other browsers in an informal manner. Although it's not a huge deal to workaround the issues with various Opera versions, it's clearly a bigger deal for Microsoft to support Opera right away, compared to Firefox and Safari. Deferring Opera is not the problem; the problem is that Microsoft refuses to come right out and say so. Personally, I still prefer IE for daily use, but it's flat-out misleading when Microsoft says "all modern browsers" and omits Opera.
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