AJAX learning hurdle

Posted May 30, 2005 * Comments(3)

I dreamt up an AJAX app over the last two days, figured out the high level approach, was all set to get into it. Tonight I actually attempted to start.

And I’ve hit a stop. Granted, I haven’t directly touched dhtml, javascript, and the browser dom in some time (thank goodness), so I’m rusty, but this stuff is ugly. The first three articles I read, most of the space is devoted to making it work across browsers. Ugh.

The thing is, I have 15 other started-but-not-finished projects vying for my attention. I’d love to get into AJAX (all the cool kid are doing it), but it’s just too much of an effort right now.

Until there are some convenient wrappers around this stuff, it’s not going to be picked up very much, at least not by lazy but somewhat useful people like me. Maybe that’s a good thing; consultants always need complicated things they can charge a lot for.

UPDATE: Shortly after posting this I got things working.

3 Comments so far

  1. Justin Shreve on May 30th, 2005

    There are actually a few wrappers for AJAX..

    Sajax, Lace, and JSpan to name a few.

  2. Chris on June 1st, 2005

    I’m about to get into the same AJAX boat, so I feel your pain. Javascript is one of my least favorite languages, but it’s the only option for the active client part of the system. And as Google Maps has shown, there are some incredible things an AJAX architecture can do that server-side scripting can’t.

    The AJAX wrappers mentioned by Justin look fairly promising, but really early in the development cycle (as one would expect.) In fact, I think Lace has already dropped out of the running as of June 1st. Dojo looks like a slick toolkit for creating advanced widgets, and SAJAX looks like the beginnings of a broader server-neutral AJAX toolset.

  3. Jonathan on July 8th, 2005

    I second that. I’m diving into AJAX now too with some image refreshing. Need to be reloading some graphs, so I need to figure out how to reload those graphs and be able to switch between different ones while not changing the page, so some image swapping + AJAXifiedness :P

    We’ll see how it goes..hopefully it won’t be too hard to figure out.

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