Comments on: AJAX is great, except for the J and the X

By: Administrator

Administrator — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 23:49:09 +0000

Sorta…. my understanding is that the Javascript engines on both IE and FireFox are really and truly single threaded. However the calls out to xmlhttp can be asynchronous. This still means that you can only do one thing at a time in the Javascript although you can have multiple outstanding XMLHTTP calls. On balance this single threaded approach was a good thing because Javascript was really about ‘enhancing’ HTML, not about creating a full fledge programming language and multi-threaded programming is a pain.

By: Karthik

Karthik — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 04:01:12 +0000

Though the callback function is single threaded as such, it is quite possible to make XHR multi threaded by nature.

And yeah. Stupid XML bloat.

By: Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah

Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 14:06:26 +0000

Here, here... This sounds vaguely familiar and we need more of such rants... The addition, a year on, is GWT and perhaps Atlas maturing. Dojo, the Yahoo browser bit, and the various framewoks are also getting better even though they too need documentation and lots of code samples. The browser remains a fragile environment requiring much voodoo even if it is improving and we have our Venkman, Dom Inspectors and Firebugs. The XForms and InfoPath approaches too are maturing and are players in this Great Game of Form applications. (the Infopath runtime is apparently being ported to the browser in Office 2007 - one hopes this is a cross-brower move, and conversely XForms in Mozilla is getting there slowly). These approaches aim for the declarative styles of programming. As developers, we all want to be spoilt as we try to build rich web apps and you've hit the nail on the head about the need for the "pain-free execution environment". You should be much quoted for that one. Still it is hard to understate the importance of little things like syntax, the view source imperative and the like. I was prognosticating that 2007 would be a fun year in this game and it is fitting. Lots more people are trying to build rich web applications and the competition is a good thing (hell those Flex folks are also in the mix). Thus the game is on. I hope we keep the unloved html button in our sights.