The last few days I have noticed an influx of the term AJAX around the
net. After a little bit of investigation I realized that it is
nothing more than a technology that I invented (or maybe Microsoft
did...) I know that may seem hard to believe. But let me
explain.
I have had to support and ASP 3.0 site that has been infested with MS'
classic remote scripting for sometime. I worked with another
developer who absolutely loved the stuff. In the midst of working
with him I managed to create an alternative using IE's native XML
objects and XML Data Islands. (I eventually got into XSLT and
script-based transforms that let me filter and sort on the fly).
After this developer moved on I ended up having to support much of his
work. In case you don't know classic RemoteScripting uses a
small Java applet; we ran into problems during the Sun-MS java
war. We would get a support call and would have to see if we
could find MS' on their web site when we couldn't we would send them to
Sun... until the Sun Jvm stopped working!! Then we were totally
screwed!
I managed to re-write the MS Classic RemoteScripting so that it used an
XML Data Island (so IE 5.0+ would work again beautifully... We don't
support Mozilla because we're talking about an Intranet site). We
still use this today.
I guess as someone who has had tons of experience with the technology I
can tell you that I truly am torn by it. It's solves a lot of
problems, but it also is a pain to debug; it is a pain to support as
you're always afraid of that next browser upgrade that breaks
everything. The other problem is that you are always tempted to
stream whole resultsets to the browser (resist this... a round trip is
not that bad versus the lengthy javascript that you will be writing)
Oh so how did I invent it? Since I use XML Data Islands all my
calls return valid XML and it's all initiated by JavaScript... someday
I may build this for ASP.Net 1.1 (but of course i will never release it
for fear of the dangerous misuse that may result ).