Brilliant Thinking

The emergence of the AJAX programming style in the past year and a half has made rich web clients more than just a pipe dream. The fact that it uses established technologies that are in some cases a decade old means that there is relatively little vendor control over its use.

CBR Online story.

According to Coach Wei -� founder and CTO of Java/AJAX tools firm Nexaweb Technologies Inc and one of the founders of the Open AJAX project - the top issue at this point is interoperability. With anywhere from 150 to 200 different AJAX tools out there, there are as yet no standards for making widgets, or visual controls, which are portable from one to the other. However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. As the scripting language JavaScript (the “J” in AJAX) is notably unstructured, and consequently, best practices have yet to emerge on how to readily debug JavaScript.

AJAX, a Web 2.0 technology, does provide for some excellent applications - for example Google Analytics, Basecamp, Flickr, iStockPhoto and many more. As applications (ie tools used by a known and identifiable group of users), the AJAX integration provides for beneficial tool to enable a link between a web page and a server-side application without needing a page refresh every time you click a button or link. This may be an over simplistic abstraction, but it is the essence of AJAX. What happens within the AJAX code is limited only by your requirements.

An alternative to AJAX is Adobe Flash. Flash has also had the ability (via Actionscript) to conduct XML interactions with server-side applications. You could argue that Flash is better because it provides additional tools for developing a user interface for your application, so you can get both form and function and effectively deploy a rich application to users desktops via a web browser. This was the push behind Macromedia’s (now Adobe) Rich Media Applications that have been around for a few years now. See Pandora as an example of a Rich Media Application, essentially using AJAX principles behind the Flash interface.

So, the idea is not a new one, but the questions of how we deploy it in a standards-oriented way so that we can safely transform a set of JavaScript programs into a formal architecture which we can enhance and develop as a true enterprise-class framework.

As an aside, we should also not get carried away with the hype of new technologies and look to put Ajax into everything we do. As an application framework it is a very useful addition to the toolkit, but for straightforward web design and development it’s overkill. Remember, JavaScript = no search engine indexing of the content presented by the JavaScript. It also means potential accessibility issues if people have JavaScript disabled. Flash is more portable and may be a better option but it depends on who is going to be using the application.

AJAX will continue to grow in popularity and ubiquity, and as standards and best practices are developed it will become a more capable solution. One advantage it has over Flash is that it’s just another coding language and so is more accessible to developers than Flash which is a different proposition as it requires new applications and new techniques, and often a designer :).

There is an interesting article on The Register today about Utility Data Centres and the area of Utility Computing. Although they suggest on the first page that it will be larger organisations who start to embrace the trend, about half way down page 2, they say:

“Long term, or so the theory goes, the majority of users will gradually shift towards utility-based service provision for all their IT needs. They will specify their basic resource and service requirements and be able to add short-term services and resources, at a cost, when required. This will be particularly important for small companies, for they would be able to pay as they use the platform resources and applications licences that otherwise they would not be able to afford to buy outright. That way, they could compete on level terms with much bigger rivals. And for any company aiming at the maximum in agility to meet changing market demands they could, so long as they could pay for its use, simply “open the tap” and there the necessary resources would be. A marketing campaign that generates more business than even the most wildly optimistic marketroid’s forecasts? Just open the tap and get the resources you need.”

In our modest view, smaller companies have more easily justifiable resturn on investment for utility computing and will also find the shift easier to make as there are less legacy issues and embedded processes. Expect to see more use of utility computing this year …

As the technology world moves rapidly forward, are we approaching a place of “pay for access” or do devices such as MP3 players (solid state or otherwise), etc, have a future?

As bandwidth increases, and companies like Telewest mooting a 100Mb service by the end of 2006, will we need to carry our own personal stores of media, or will we simply be able to just pay a flat monthly fee and access anything we choose, whenever we want? Now that’s a goal worth pursuing methinks.

I could simply access my online account and choose my personal library of tunes, movies, content, etc. This library could be accessed wirelessly from any mobile device I may happen to be carrying around - dedicated MP3 player, mobile phone, portable media player, laptop, etc - and I could play, skip, shuffle, pause as I feel fit. Sure, in the early days there would be “premium content” that I could access for a small fee on top of my access charge (that’s how it works), but I would not be restricted by formats, DRM, etc, etc, and just be able to access and explore a world of media “channels” at my leisure - even in my own home.

But what about “pause live TV”? Surely we’d need a hard disk for that? Ultimately, no. With much more capable infrastructures at key content providers (Network TV Stations), they would have the infrastructure in place that tagged the programme you were watching and paused it on their system (they would run their own hard disks or equivalent) so you could resume whenver you liked - even from another device in another place since you just need to log in to your account from your current location and pick up where you left off.

Sounds like a far-fetched future?

Not so … Sky announced yesterday that they were launching a Sky-by-Mobile service. According to stuffmag.co.uk: Sky By Mobile is available on all networks, but you’ll need a compatible GPRS or 3G handset - you’ll find model details on the Sky By Mobile website. While Sky makes no charge for the service, you will have to pay standard data fees to your network.

1. Voice-Over-Internet Protocol (VOIP) Goes Mainstream.
2. China’s Power and World Economic Influence Grows.
3. Working at Home Goes Mainstream While Small Business Thrives.
4. Offshoring Activity Picks Up.
5. As the World Shrinks, the World Market Expands.
6. Technology Stocks Increase in Value.
7. Cell Phones look more and more like PDAs and vice versa.
8. Blogging and Social Networking Become Accepted Business Tools.
9. Continued Sophistication in Corporate Internet Usage.
10. Enterprises Increasingly Demand Flexible Solutions.

For more information about each prediction, please visit the original article.

In our view, numbers 3, 7, 9 and 10 are interrelated and require increasingly innovative solutions to traditional problems. According to our internet maturity model, these solutions occur in level 4 and 5 maturity - the area we get a kick out of working in!