Ajax, the best thing since sliced bread?

Ok, Ajax has received an awful lot of hype lately. As anyone who has developed web pages since the 90's, most of the technologies that represent Ajax have been around for years. However, it is just recently that its use has really taken of. The funny thing is that HTTP was developed as a stateless protocol. The concept of sessions, cookies and XMLHttpRequest are really just "patches" to compensate for this fact.

JavaScript is fabulous for a lot of things, but developing complex Ajax applications can be quite a challenge. But this may have more to do with a lack of good Ajax toolkits than Ajax itself. Ajax is after all still in its infancy, and there are already several attempts at developing Ajax toolkits, some with more success than others. The question is really if something better should be invented, or if the solution is to build more technologies on top of what now seems like a fairly fragile web.

Because the fact is that complex web applications show some serious limitations. They can be slow, and do not offer the same kind of robustness as tried and true desktop applications. However, I firmly believe that this issue will improve over time as the technologies mature, browsers become better, computers become faster and developers get used to the new frameworks and toolkits.

We have just seen the beginning of where Web applications can go. Up until now, a lot of the Ajax effort has been to resemble on the web what has already been done with regular desktop applications. Take the new Yahoo Mail as an example. It now closely resembles Microsoft Outlook with drag-and-drop functionality, preview-pane etc. (ideas that came from from Oddpost, the web mail Yahoo bought several years ago).

My belief is that any application can be moved to the web. And I mean ANY. Mail and word processeors are only the beginning, and we are already seeing attempts at online movie-editing applications. In a few years, the only thing we'll need is a good web browser and the operating system it runs on will become completely irrelevant.

Ok, enough rambling. Happy surfing :)