RSSGates Calls AJAX 'Very Complex,' Touts Silverlight as an Alternative
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published May 9, 2007, 12:26 PM
During a Strategic Account Summit meeting in Seattle for investors and analysts yesterday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates downplayed the role of Asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX) technologies in future Web development. Gates said this immediately following a demonstration of Silverlight created for Major League Baseball, one of whose principal virtues is that its back end is written entirely in C#, to run within the .NET Compact Framework.
"Over the last three or four years, people have been really finding the limitations of HTML to be very problematic," Gates told the audience, according to Microsoft's official transcript, "and they've been trying some browser capabilities that we had really going back over five years with Internet Explorer 4.0. But even though so-called AJAX-type technologies have forced very complex development, and they don't integrate into the traditional HTML very well. They've been experimenting with things that you download that let you do more interactivity and media."
Gates' statement coincides with last week's comments from his chief architect, Ray Ozzie, which also detach Silverlight from its technological bindings with AJAX. Together, they make absolutely clear their company's marketing strategy: to entice Web developers to adopt two classes of technologies with which they may not yet be familiar. Specifically, they are Windows Communication Foundation, which supports the OASIS WS-* Web services model upon which non-browser-dependant applications will depend; and applications development languages like C#, with their static typing and rigid, object-oriented rules.
For Microsoft's marketing plan to work, Web developers will have to buy into the message that they can accomplish more in the interactivity department using C# as an application platform, then using Microsoft's own ASP.NET AJAX and HTML.
But since Silverlight is based on the company's former WPF/E technology, which exposes services to AJAX as a .NET language just as easily as it does to C# as a .NET language, it may take more than a flashy, interactive baseball diamond for Microsoft to make a successful pitch.
As BetaNews has noted previously, all eight public demos of Silverlight applications on Microsoft's Web site are built on ASP.NET AJAX. Of course, some might argue that since those demos were designed to be accessible to visitors to Microsoft's Web site via a browser, AJAX was the better choice...maybe.
On the other hand, some developers might argue that since users will be connecting to Web sites first, and Web applications second, a more browser-oriented language like AJAX may be preferable to a rigidly-typed language like C#, designed for stand-alone applications.
As Microsoft's own developers are demonstrating, Silverlight applications using AJAX may be just as functional and "immersive" from the user's perspective as those written in stand-alone languages.
But Microsoft's incentives behind the "good/better/best" approach to Silverlight marketing may include a need to attract partners whose interests are to develop services that appear to stand alone from typical browser-based Web apps.
During a demonstration yesterday of the MLB application, Microsoft's technical product manager Brian Goldfarb described his company's new partner like this: "Major League Baseball has made a huge business of online access to content and games. Their player is an extension of their league, of their brand, and of their experience. And it has evolved dramatically over time. They're particularly interested in Silverlight because it can create an incredibly immersive experience that will capture their users' eyeballs for longer."
This won't be the first case of Microsoft struggling with locating the best point at which to split hairs, especially when making simultaneous appeals to "developers, developers, developers" and marketing partners. It's a legitimate market battle this time around, with Microsoft contending against Adobe and Sun in a field where it may not even be the #2 player, and where it's working to obtain something it hasn't had to wrest for itself in several years: a toehold.
pay no attention to the man behind the curtain running the AJAX application.
Hey, if Apple made their own AJAX products, might they be named AppleJAX? :)
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|I tried to program basic script with AJAX, but it pwned me. It pwned me hard. I saw that it LOOKED like HTML, which is rather easy in notepad. Then, I tried. Crash and Burned.
Gates is a smart man. He will solve my delema.
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|I wouldn't say this to just anybody.
You should use Microsoft products, exclusively.
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|The idea here is that you need a Microsoft Windows Server to create the best dynamic websites. Currently AJAX runs just as well on an Apache (Apache runs on all major server platforms) server as it does an IIS (runs only on Windows) server.
This is all about server sales and marketing, nothing really about software development and end user experience.
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|Exactly.
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|While I understand where Bill Gates is coming from, his solution is not a good one.
"Over the last three or four years, people have been really finding the limitations of HTML to be very problematic,"
Which is why developers do use Javascript, Flash and sometimes (if they are naughty), they use Shockwave or Java.
"But even though so-called AJAX-type technologies have forced very complex development, and they don't integrate into the traditional HTML very well."
I like the 'so-called' part as I too think that the term 'AJAX' is funny. It's as bad as the term 'DHTML'. However, the claim that AJAX doesn't integrate into traditional HTML is ridiculous. It integrates beautifully into traditional HTML and unlike using Silverlight and Flash, AJAX based applications can be written to comply with SEO techniques and to integrate seamlessly into a site.
Microsoft wants to sell it's new platform, and that's very neato. I'm sure they'll start writing software support related things in Silverlight and mandating its use for Windows Update soon.
However, when I see sites like meebo.com and browse through the many AJAX frameworks such as Ext, Spry, Google AJAX Toolkit, etc, I'm blown away with what they can do. Web developers haven't been fast to adopt these toolkits yet, and it's because a trend builds and then snowballs.
Just look at things such as the Lightbox Javascript. It's almost ubiquitous, easy to incorporate into websites without disturbing the structure of the HTML, and it's clever.
Fighting a war is all about strategy, not who has the bigger guns. I see AJAX as a beautiful strategy to extend what a traditional website can do. Flash is a thing unto itself - a site is either a web site or a flash site generally. Or it's a site with flash ads and other little things.
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Silverlight is not a strategy, it's a hard headed 'solution' that is like dropping an atomic bomb on the net. It doesn't comply with any of the standards that are set out there and it's going to be hard to convince other companies to support it.
If Silverlight is strictly supposed to exist as a application environment separate from the web - well neat. I'm not seeing then what the big deal is as .NET seems to have no problem with this.
[zzz]
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|The complex part is figuring out how Microsoft can extract money from everybody when they are using open standards. A little FUD might scare them back into the fold.
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|AJAX isn't hard. AJAX security isn't hard either:
- Remember that client side code is entirely open source and assume that a hacker will know exactly what all of it does. This means your silly base64 "encryption" is useless. Not that it's useful in cookies or anywhere else for encryption purposes anyway...
- Never trust any input sent to the server, through AJAX or through normal requests. Always validate it (IE use SSL and send the user's username and password with every AJAX request, and validate them before granting the AJAX request). Assume a hacker could send whatever data he wants in the form of a fake AJAX request.
All AJAX is is a couple of special JavaScript classes (only because IE refuses to name theirs the same as everyone else's, as usual) that allows you to connect to the remote server to send and receive more data. Quite simple.
There's all sorts of big fuss being made about security exploits and cross-site attacks etc etc etc, I think the root problem is likely that programmers using AJAX simply don't take the time to understand what exactly it is they are using. If they did security implications might become more clear.
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|I agree mainly, although you should have kept your side comments to yourself. IE's "JavaScript Classes", namely xmlhttp was around years before the others. Why did the others have to go running off on their own when the solution already existed, and was in use?
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