The Upside of Ajax
Near as I can tell, none of the major Ajax sites have referenced Tim Bray’s piece entitled The Real AJAX Upside. Tim hits on some of my company’s reasons for adding Ajax to our applications – it makes them perform better (or, more precisely, it looks to the customer like it does – waiting for a full page refresh just takes time). While I fundamentally like the idea of pushing more work down to the client (kind of like SETI) we can’t forget that the browser is not always the ideal environment for, you know, heavy duty XML processing. I’ve been stressing the usability aspects of Ajax but maybe I need to push this comment:
Yeah, that cool, responsive AJAXy stuff is nice but maybe it’s the icing on the cake; the real win is making the Web run faster.
What do you think? Should we pitch Ajax as a usability story or is it about performance? Or is this just a classic win-win situation? Oh, and if you are trying to justify bringing Ajax into your application, check out Measuring the usability and business benefits of AJAX and AJAX performance stats, ROI, and business value.
I pick usability over performance any time. If nobody wants to use it, what good will it be that it has great performance anyway?
By the way, thanks for picking my article up: “AJAX performance stats, ROI, etc…”
Frankly, me too…if the product can’t be used, it doesn’t matter how great your backend is. Of course if your performance is horrible, your usability will suffer! Thanks for writing the article, I was happy to link to it. Everyone still seems caught up in the “isn’t this cool” stage and haven’t gotten on to the benefits. My apologies for not putting your name in the post – that was rude. Thanks for the comment!
BTW, I’ve been tracking your blog for a while now – keep up the good work!