3/28/2006

Oracle Launches Business Intelligence Tools

A few days back Oracle launched its business intelligence tools. Here is the article:
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3/02/2006

Are we over-emphasizing Ajax Frameworks?

I have been an ardent supporter for Ajax technology. It can be very useful for websites where data loaded at a time is quite huge and we can break it up into smaller groups which can interact with Server independently and asynchronously. One of the prime example for this could be Enterprise Portals.

But now a days we have so many Ajax Frameworks being developed, some of them wants to totally eliminate javascript usage. I don’t know how far these frameworks will really ease the implementation of Ajax. I have implemented Ajax in few of our projects, and thankfully there were not many Frameworks available at the time. If there had been so many framework available, I would have never understood that how easily I can achieve the task I wanted by just using Asynchronous requests through Javascript. The framework adds to the learning curve, and unless some standardization is achieved one should thing twice before using these Frameworks.

Some frameworks have very good functionalities relating to higher user experience or good GUI like Drag and Drop, move around components etc. Using some library functions and Api’s provided by such frameworks can ease the developer task, but it should be seen as a supplement to javascript rather then completely replacing javascripts. Plus I don’t thing Ajax should be seen as tool for developing Flashy websites (this can be seen as added advantage). I guess the soul of Ajax is its high user interactivity with the Server and should be used for the same. For Flashy stuff there are other things like Flash (and ya, macromedia is coming up with its own version of Ajax though, have to wait and watch for its reponse-;)).

The other issue is how well these Frameworks are adapted for new technologies? Can they be used in Enterprise Portals where each portlet window can have same Ajax implementation frameworks and hence clashes of names, actionURL etc could be possible. Plus in portals the response is not send to the portlet at all. Can the framework adapt to such changes?

In my view if someone just wants to use Ajax for faster user interactivity, one should directly use Javascript and follow some good structure instead trying to modify and learn new Ajax frameworks.