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May 22, 2006
Ajax vs Java
Ajax vs Java: Chris Adamson of O'Reilly attended last week's JavaOne conference in San Francisco, where hallway conversations pushed back against using JavaScript as the client engine, in deference to Java. Chris notes "Frankly, client-side Java is a pretty small part of the Java world right now,", but then tells why the recent popular emphasis on JavaScript still leaves him uneasy: "While client-side Java may not have the right answers to key questions, it at least knows which questions to address, and chief among these is compatibility. AJAX's concept of compatibility is a sort of 'well, all modern browsers kind of do these things more or less this way... the differences aren't that bad, so you figure it out'. Like Melee simplifying combat by ignoring it, AJAX simplifies compatibililty by ignoring it. What AJAX gains in its key story, deployment, I think it loses in compatibility, to say nothing of lurking gotchas like accessibility. Maybe this isn't a problem now when your AJAX app is running on the computers of you and your tech-savvy friends, but when you're on a government contract that has to support accessibility modes that AJAX is blissfully unaware of, or when you doom level one tech support to telling Grandma how to upgrade her copy of IE for Windows 98 ('it came with the computer, I don't know what version it is!'), I suspect we're going to see some serious unintended consequences. Java deployment is a damn nightmare, no question about it, but once installed any applet, WebStart'ed app, etc. should run the same spec'ed way everywhere."
Posted by JohnDowdell at May 22, 2006 05:20 PM
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Comments
Hello,
Interesting post.. I attended JavaOne and blogged about 'Microsoft at JavaOne', you can read about at http://blogs.msdn.com/mohammadakif
Best regards,
Mohammad
Posted by: Mohammad Akif at May 22, 2006 06:21 PM
I am making the classic mistake here by commenting without reading the whole story, but...
Why on earth would a client-side Java proponent bring up *accessibility* in a battle to make Java look better than Javascript? Though Flash has some nice accessibility features built in (which are rarely used), even MM/Adobe knows better than to bring *that* up as a battleground.
Hearing about client-side java again makes me wonder if Hypercolor is eventually going to come back too.
Posted by: Mike D. at May 23, 2006 12:32 AM
I've coded JavaScript and Java and I must say that writing JavaScript for html pages is a lot easier and lightweight than writing Java UI.
Posted by: Goose at May 23, 2006 08:18 AM
what is the role of JFrame in AJAX?
[jd sez: I'm not deleting the question, but I'm not sure what it intends to ask, or why it is actually being asked here.]
Posted by: vighnesh at September 18, 2006 08:10 PM