Tuesday, April 22, 2008
The trouble with AJAX frameworks...
As my brother would say, I've been busier than a one-legged Riverdancer just lately....
I'm working for two clients simultaneously - a mix of Classic ASP and ASP.Net by day and PHP5 by night. In both cases, I'm making use of AJAX Frameworks and herein lies the problem. Conceptually, using a framework rather than dong everything yourself "from scratch" is a good thing, since it should save re-inventing the wheel.
However, I'm finding in both cases (Microsoft ASP.Net Ajax for one, QCodo for the other) that things are either incomplete, inadequately documented, or just plain broken. I'm increasingly finding myself spending more time fixing little rendering issues (or things that don't render at all) and less time dealing with the core functionality of the application.
Its frustrating, to say the least.
I'm working for two clients simultaneously - a mix of Classic ASP and ASP.Net by day and PHP5 by night. In both cases, I'm making use of AJAX Frameworks and herein lies the problem. Conceptually, using a framework rather than dong everything yourself "from scratch" is a good thing, since it should save re-inventing the wheel.
However, I'm finding in both cases (Microsoft ASP.Net Ajax for one, QCodo for the other) that things are either incomplete, inadequately documented, or just plain broken. I'm increasingly finding myself spending more time fixing little rendering issues (or things that don't render at all) and less time dealing with the core functionality of the application.
Its frustrating, to say the least.
Comments:
Links to this post:
<< Home
One of my clients (I'm in PR) markets a Web database development tool, and in their new version, they started adding support for AJAX features. They're doing stuff for the GUI and stuff that targets back-end performance via asynchronous communications. Their approach is to abstract complexities away for the developer. The current version requires one or two lines of script to implement an AJAX feature. They're working to eliminate that, and make AJAX development fully visual. It's not an approach for everyone, but it does flatten the learning curve that some developers are complaining about. Time will tell whether their approach is too high level for the market. With AJAX, though, history does seem to be repeating itself. Some of us remember the early days of GUIs, when people first coded them by hand. Then a glut of frameworks appeared. Eventually GUI elements were componentized and just baked into the app dev tools; no third-party frameworks were required in many, if not all cases.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
<< Home
