March 28th, 2005
Will the real AJAX pioneer please stand up
While Longtail may have gotten the award for biggest buzzword of PC Forum from my partner in crime Dan Farber, the acronym that’s been ringing in my RSS-inbox for the last three weeks — one that’s spanned three events in two weeks (eTech, SXSW, and PC Forum) — is Ajax. According to Accessify.com, Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Virtually everyone on the Web who’s discussing Ajax points to Jesse James Garrett’s in-depth technical explanation of how an Ajax application works. But, for the most part, you don’t have to know how Ajax works to recognize it. In many ways, it’s one of those things where you’ll know it when you see it. If, for example, you encounter an incredibly interactive browser-based application — one that has does all sorts of things that are normally associated with fat client applications — without the assistance of any plug-ins or other local client technologies beyond the browser, there’s a good chance that Ajax is at work.
Now, with XML flowing through the Internet’s veins, the idea is that the basic technology found in most browsers is good enough to provide a fairly rich client experience. Such has been the case with many of Google’s applications (like GMail) that, without the benefit of any local assistance, provide a surprisingly interactive experience. In reviewing GMail last year, InfoWorld’s John Udell wasn’t expecting anything extraordinary. But after peeking under GMail’s hood, he described GMail’s lookahead addressing cache and spellchecker as "remarkable tricks." Back then, however, the term "Ajax" wasn’t yet in vogue.
In describing Google’s liberal application of Ajax, Garrett said in his blog, "Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach. All of the major products Google has introduced over the last year – Orkut, Gmail, the latest beta version of Google Groups, Google Suggest, and Google Maps – are Ajax applications." Two weeks ago, News.com’s Paul Festa asked Will Ajax help Google clean-up
Not being one to miss any interesting conversation on the Web, Microsoft’s Robert Scoble commented last week that Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access (OWA) should be noted as an Ajax pioneer: a bold statement that drew criticism because, even though OWA is a pretty slick browser-based e-mail interface, it doesn’t work nearly as well in Mozilla and Safari as it does in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. We’ve made similar observations here at ZDNet with some of Microsoft’s other smart-browser clients. For example, when we were testing Microsoft’s Sharepoint Server last year, the user experience was far richer in Internet Explorer than it was in any other browser.
In contrast, Google appears to have gone out of its way to make its Ajax-based applications work as well as they can across all available browsers. Personally, if there’s an application that should get the killer-Ajax application award, it probably should be Scalix’s browser-based e-mail client. In his blog, Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady calls Scalix’s implementation "comparable" to that of OWA, but goes on to say that "Gmail offers full functionality over a variety of browsers, while OWA renders poorly (I know, I have to use it at home) in non-IE browsers. For that reason alone, OWA cannot be considered the best." Meanwhile, if you’ve ever seen Scalix’s browser-based client — which, like Google’s client-side technologies, is non-browser specific, I think you’ll agree that it rocks.
