Digging Behind the Numbers: 3 in 4 Use Ajax

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, September 13, 2006 @ 8:00 am

By now you've probably already heard about the SD Times article summarizing a survey by their sister company, BZ Research, that claims that three in four developers have either launched or are planning to launch applications incorporating Ajax. It sounds like Ajax is spreading like a cold in an overworked development team. But you really have to look behind the numbers to understand who is answering the survey and exactly what use they are planning to make of Ajax.

SD Times is targeted at software development managers, so it isn't a developer focused nuts-and-bolts publication. You're mostly talking about corporate IT departments here. Just looking at their table of contents will tell you that they deal more with software business issues -- which vendor is releasing what, who is acquiring whom, what the government is doing about topic X -- and not at all with development, design, and architectural issues. You can almost hear these managers in their weekly status meetings say to their CTO, "yeah, sure, we've got Ajax in there."

So exactly what kind of Ajax is "in there?" A quote from the article is revealing:

"We are looking into using the technology for a Windows-like interface to our embedded system," said Wendi Whitcomb, a senior systems engineer at ZoZo Engineering, while Jeffrey Price, president of Price Performance, explained, "Customers demand desktop application look and feel. Citrix/Terminal server approach [is] becoming cost prohibitive due to licensing costs." Scott Finnerty, technical director of Barkley Evergreen & Partners Interactive, said, "We've embraced Rich Internet Application development as being key to the future of user experience for our clients."

These folks are from a class of companies who want to move their GUI desktop apps to the Web (see 10 Business Reasons to Use Ajax, reason #3). In particular, the number of companies that use Citrix to give remote access to their applications is legion. They most likely have a large development staff with expertise in VB or Visual C++, and were just getting comfortable with .NET when Ajax came along. These people are a long way off from re-architecting and re-implementing their systems as Ajax-based RIA's. It's easy to consider; it's harder to do.

I'm sure another large group of these enthusiastic adopters are those incrementally improving their webapp's user experience by folding edit forms into a single page. The barriers to entry for splicing an XMLHttpRequest into a page are not that high. Their users won't have to make as many clicks to get their work done, but it's a long way off from a true document based, direct manipulation application -- no desktop GUI here. Also, layering another technology like Ajax on top of your creaky struts/J2EE application, has its own hazards for productivity and software quality.

Last, a fair number will be scared off by sheer ignorance:

Security seems to be a common concern, with AJAX being "too much exposed for the client side: Some delegated checking should be double-checked in server, since in the client side it seems to be exposed to crack it," said Paulo Soares, general manager of Central Call.

It's not the Ajax, it's a poorly designed applications that let users persist executable artifacts, such as JavaScript and Flash, which can then be pushed to other users via their browsers, where the compromise occurs. And of course you validate data coming from the client in the server. Why wouldn't you?

What does this survey really tell us? Simply that Ajax has high buzzword awareness, that some major vendors like Microsoft and Tibco are lending credibility to its use, and that certain early adopters such as Google, Digg, and various e-commerce sites, have proven that it can be used to gain a competitive advantage. It's enough to make even a conservative software development manager feel the itch to make plans.

Technorati : ajax, development, security, trends

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