Why Ajax Is So Disruptive
posted Thursday, 19 January 2006
Yesterday I wrote an invited response in the Ajax Developer's Journal to Jeffrey Zeldman's off-kilter but widely read (i.e. Slashdotted) take on Web 2.0. In it I claimed Zeldman had way too much focus on Ajax as a Web 2.0 ingredient. All these trips around the proverbial mulberry bush while we are witnessing a rapidly growing greater awareness of all things Web 2.0 in the mainstream. Heck, even CIO Magazine has started talking about Web 2.0, which means its really arrived if they think people up in the rareified air of executive management need to know about it at all.
But I often deempasize Ajax because I think a lot of people equate Ajax with Web 2.0, which just isn't the case. Ajax can be an important plank in Web 2.0-friendly software. It provides a robust, interactive, high-intensity, cross platform user interface in the browser. And it demands Web services in order to function at all (which encourages web sites to make an API out of their service from the get go.) In this way and others, Ajax tends to drive people down the right paths from the beginning. This includes making applications available anywhere at the invocation of a simple URL and a ready-to-use toolkit to create mash-ups (Ajax must have Web services on the back-end, yours or others that you've redirected.) But great Web 2.0 software doesn't require Ajax at all; del.icio.us, for example, which I don't believe has any Ajax.
Anyway, it's easy to forget we have a long way to go in the next generation of the Web. Years and years. As Shel Israel put it so pointedly yesterday, "Web 2.0 isn't dead. It's just barely being born." And smart folks that study the big picture of all this realize seismic things are afoot. That our personal and work lives are being transformed with surprising speed and ease to this new world of pervasive, online, collaborative, aggressively integrated, two-way software. Patrick Cormier recently had some good observations that the old creaky, slow-moving, and unresponsive software of old is going away. It just can't compete with this vibrant, dynamic way of creating, delivering, using, and leveraging software as a service. It's not a new way, as he observes, good software tended always to be built this way, just not so consciously.
But I assert that Ajax encourages, even enables, software creators down a path that is inherently disruptive to the greater software world. Here's why:
Ajax's Disruptive Influences
- The End of Software Upgrades, Fixes, and Security Patches: This is one of several major advantages that pervasive software gives you. Since Ajax software delivers an application fresh to your browser each time you load the URL, you're always getting the latest version, with all fixes and updates, automatically. Any back-end software experiences the same seamless upgrades. Traditional native software will never be able to compete with this and people will get very used to never having to update or patch again (often converting their data along the way.)
- Software and Data Available Wherever You Go: How many of us are tired of synchronizing their personal, work, and family computers with the latest software and files? I know I am. I love it that great Ajax software like Writely lets me have my software, and all my data, wherever I am at the click of a URL. I can effortlessly share it with others when I want and I never have to spend any of my time copying files to thumb drives, e-mailing things to other accounts, etc. It makes life so much simpler and easy. Traditional software can do some of this, but it's just so much more seamless the Ajax way. And because Ajax apps generally require no installation of software, you can run your apps and get your data anywhere you find a browser: at an Internet kiosk, cafe, library, friends home, etc.
- Isolated Software Can't Compete with Connected Software: Ajax software is delivered using the entire Web as a platform. That means it can (with a little proxy on the server, provided by the Ajax developer) talk to and use any service out on the greater Web. This has facilitated a dizzying array of mash-ups. And it means that software created from scratch is going away, as it should. The best software is now highly integratd into the Web and leverages the rich landscape of services that can be found there. Small example: The terrific Web 2.0 start page, NetVibes, now has Writely integration. Never mind more classic examples like Housingmaps, which is an Ajax application that integrates data from two entirely different places on the Web. Stand-alone software can compete in a limited sense here actually, but Ajax encourages and enables this way of thinking by forcing the software developer down the path of using lightweight Web services from the outset.
- Deprecation of the Traditional Operating System: It used to be that software was tied to a given operating system, since much software uses a specific OS as a platform. Yes, Java doesn't do this but it falls into the category of being its own platform for this discussion. The issue is that Ajax software is almost completely operating system neutral. Ajax applications use the Web itself as their platform and just need a browser with JavaScript and XmlHttpRequest. And to be sure, some browser compatibility testing must be done, but that will issue will likely only decrease as Ajax development tools provide the browser abstraction automatically. In the end, whether a user is running Windows, Linux, MacOS, or something else entirely doesn't matter. Ajax is even on mobile devices now. This is enormously disruptive to the gigantic operating system industry which generally depends on being the most compelling platform for their target audience. That just isn't the case any more. The Web is that compelling platform for an increasing number of people.
- Software That Is Invisible: This is a harder to define one but it's one that I notice personally with Ajax and Web 2.0 applications in general. I just get work done, I don't even notice the software anymore. I'm writing this in an Ajax editor as a matter of fact and one thing I realize is that I never worry about if I have the software installed that I need, whether I have the security permissions, if my data is nearby. All of these concerns slip away and I'm getting done what I need to get done. Increasingly, as I use Flickr, Writely, Google Reader, HipCal, del.icio.us, my web mail client, and others, I just don't even notice they are there just there when I need them. And I'm not spending time maintaining them, installing them, or synchronizing data. Those days are gone and I just don't want to go back. Traditional native software will never compete with this, it's way too high maintenance, low quality, and clunky. That's not to say you can't do abomidable things with Ajax but the Web just routes around the bad implementations. That's much harder with just a few choices for usable native software.
None of this doesn't mean there aren't important issues with Ajax. They are increasingly being solved, but include the need for high-speed, quality connectivity, security and trust concerns, the ability to easily switch providers if your online software provider goes out of business or just starts to suck, and others. But none of them is big enough to outweight the enormous disruptive forces that Ajax brings to bear.
And if you want to see this Ajax software personally, take a look at these lists of Web 2.0 software here and here. Not all are Ajax, but a large number are.
Why do you think Ajax will or won't be one of the biggest software development stories of 2006?links: del.icio.us
"The End of Software Upgrades, Fixes, and Security Patches" - this feature
is closer to client-server technology, not AJAX.
Yes, I do agree with all commentors so far.
