We spent a few minutes with Coach Wei, founder and CTO of Java/Ajax tools firm Nexaweb Technologies Inc and one of the founders of the Open Ajax project, to get an idea of some of the issues before the community.
At this point, Open Ajax has set up three committees focusing on marketing, interoperability, and XML markup. According to Wei, the top issue at this point is interoperability. With anywhere from 150 to 200 Ajax tools out there, there are as yet no standards for making widgets, or visual controls, portable from one to the other.
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.
Furthermore, given the fact that Ajax includes a number of low level technologies, adding structure to Ajax pages remains difficult because you have to deal with such low level tasks as parsing the XML that is contained in the Document Object Models (DOM) objects that are the basis of modern web pages.
But Wei said that these issues for now remain secondary to the main goal of attaining some rough level of cross compatibility.
While the long-term goal is making Ajax more robust for enterprise applications, Wei concedes that Ajax won’t necessarily replace more structured, object-oriented approaches using Java or .NET technologies.
For now, those approaches, which are more rigorous than scripting technologies like JavaScript, lend themselves more effectively to team development, code maintainability, and reuse. Additionally, at this point, they have superior performance and scalability.
With the Open Ajax group preparing for its next meeting in the fall, it expects to finally open up its web site and publish a white paper of current best practices.
And while the community currently numbers about 50 companies, it includes most household names except Microsoft. According to Wei, while the group has extended a standing invitation for Microsoft to join, he wouldn’t be surprised if in the long run, the Ajax community ends up consolidating into two communities mirroring what’s happened at the high, structured programming levels with Java and .NET.
