Hello everyone,
I'm a system architect and currently studying to use Ajax in a new project.
Hearing many discussion about Web 2.0. Looks like everyone thinks Ajax is the future of web applications. However I still think Ajax is still not ready.
As we are moving the user interface to the web browser, browser is no longer a document presentation client, but a application user interface rendering client. So, we are actually using HTML + Javascript as a UI modeling language.
However, to be a good development platform, it must have a number of features:
- Standard
- Portable
- Structural
- Code is easy to reuse
- Easy to code (can do simple thing with simple code)
- Easy to debug
- Reasonable development cost
I see Javascript can score a "F" grade in most subjects above. Some are because of historial problem, while others are cause by the lack of a good low-cost programming tools. I wonder what development tools I should use if I want to develop a very complicated AJAX UI(Notepad?). How can I trace my code in a page with 1000+ lines? How can I watch a variable in my code runtime(inserting alert()s?)?
If I have a programmer who don't know
Java. He can still build a swing based UI in reasonable time with Eclipse and visual editor. However, if I have a programmer who don't know Javascript. Can he do similar thing with Javascript with notepad and a browser?
IMO, to make Ajax really work, we must first have a development tool that makes Javascript development as easy as writing Java under Eclipse (as least have some code-assist).