Two Years of Agile Ajax: Web Killed Off GUI Techniques Just in Time for Ajax to Need them Again

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, March 27, 2008 @ 5:17 am

I launched this blog just a little over two years ago, on March 21st, 2006. Appropriately enough, my first post was about User Experience (UXD) and Ajax. The blog has come a long way since then -- we've added another full-time blogger (Brain Dillard), published nearly 700 articles of original Ajax and Agile related content, and covered the major new innovations in Ajax and Web 2.0 -- but in many ways Ajax technology is still struggling with the same issues that I wrote about back then:

As it stands, Ajax is still in its infancy (or in its wild west phase -- pick your metaphor), and Bill's simple three part "patterns" are emblematic of this.

Even two years later, Ajax is still in its infancy. At the AjaxWorld Conference East, I had the privilege of sitting next to Douglas 'JSON' Crockford
on the final panel. As my parting wisdom to the assembled masses in the
ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, I said that the web had
taken us a step back, from desktop GUI's to the equivalent of the
mainframe green screen, and that Ajax was reintroducing the event
driven GUI concepts to the web. So web developers were going to have to
learn a whole new bag of tricks if they wanted to make full use of the
new technology.

Where to learn this different way of designing
GUI's? The success of the web has sucked the air out of the room for
GUI design books. Most of the books on the subject are either old, not
very good, or both (see "Java GUI Development: The Authoritative
Solution" or any Swing book for a typical example). There are some
books over in the ActionScript/Flash and WinForms departments that do a
better job. Online, most of the relevant projects have also died off
(see this post I did from 2006: MVC and RIA - Learning From Desktop Apps).
Probably the best thing to do is to see which of your current web
developers have experience from a past life developing desktop GUI's.
Maybe I should crack my old Mac GUI programming books (fat chance of
that).

P.S. When we were delivering our parting wisdom, I
quipped that I shouldn't make any predictions because I had originally
argued against the inclusion of the image tag in HTML, but I was
starting to think that I might have been right. Douglas later asked me if I
had removed some of the vowels from IMG in spite, and
that the image tag was really the reason why the web succeeded. It's
good to know that I was able to inspire one of his lesser blog posts.

Technorati Tags: ajax, gui, desktop, event driven, mvc, ria

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