Edward Ort's Blog

December 2006 Archives

Insights from Jesse James Garrett, the Guy Who Coined Ajax

"Someone said that Adaptive Path's most notable product is four letter words." That was one of the many interesting quotes that Jesse James Garrett, co-founder of the product and business design consultancy, Adaptive Path, sprinkled into his keynote "Where Ajax and RIA Trends Will Take Us" at the Web Builder 2.0 Conference. The quote alludes to two specific four letter words that were coined by people at Adaptive Path: blog, coined by Peter Meyerholz, and Ajax, coined by Garrett.

In his talk, Garrett, cited some of the characteristics that distinguish the new generation of web applications. These characteristics include:

• High interactivity. Web applications are moving away from the page metaphor to an interactive application model.
• Get better with use. This is the basis of highly successful sites such as YouTube. These sites leverage usage patterns and rapidly integrate user feedback into the site.
• Deliver rich experiences. These sites have visual impact. They're also highly responsive -- that's why people are so excited about Ajax.

Garrett said that people often ask him what technologies constitute Ajax. He answers that it's not really a set of technlogies. In fact, many of the technologies that people associate with Ajax will likely be supplanted by other technologies. Instead Ajax is a design pattern, one that gets us away from the old web publishing model to a new asynchronous interaction model of the web.

Calling Ajax "our manifest destiny as an industry," Garrett said that Ajax enables the responsiveness that was previously available only in desktop applications. Furthermore, Ajax requires no compromises in terms of browser features or environmental setup. Garrett also said that one of the great things about Ajax is that you can incrementally migrate web applications to it, sprinkling in Ajax functionality a little at a time in the places that it makes most sense.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the talk was Garrett's answer to the question "What is the highest compliment that someone can give a product?" His answer: "cool!" He then went on to delve into what makes a product cool by looking at Apple's iPod. Garret underscored that what makes the iPod a success is its simplicity and attention to the user's experience. "We get ourselves into trouble when we design from the inside out." By that he meant that problems arise when technologies and features drive a product's design and the user's experience is only a secondary consideration. The successful cool products are the ones that start with the user's experiences and use it to inform the selection of technologies and features.

So be cool.

Web Builder 2.0 -- Initial Impressions of the Web 2.0/Ajax World

So here I am at the Web Builder 2.0 Conference at Caesars Palace Hotel in Las Vegas. John Crupi, a former Sun guy and now the CTO of JackBe, alluded to the interesting circumstance of doing a technical conference in Las Vegas by asking how many folks in the audience were already hung over. Only one guy admitted to that. Crupi said that he also talks at the TSS conference which is also held in Las Vegas -- usually on the third day. "By that time, pretty much everyone is hung over" he said.

This is not a heavily attended conference. Usually the opening keynote gives you a good idea of the total number of attendees. I guessed there were approximately 400-500 people in the room (which sat more than twice that much). I guess the way to look at this is that Web 2.0/Ajax is still in an emerging stage of development, so expecting a huge turnout is probably unrealistic.

So far I sat in on two sessions. The first was a keynote given by Scott Dietzen, President and CTO of Zimbra. The keynote was titled "Lessons Learned Building a 100+KLOC Ajax Application." The second was a developer session given by John Crupi titled "Ajax: Putting a Face on SOA."

The biggest impression I got at these sessions is that mashups are the really big deal (at least right now) in the Ajax/Web 2.0 world. Both Dietzen and Crupi punctuated their talks with some snazzy demos that seemlessly mashed up a variety of services into a front end interface. Dietzen's was an email application that enabled things like mousing over a sender's name to get further information about the sender, or previewing a URL in an email without having to download the page, or clicking on a plane's flight number in an email and getting flight tracking information.

Crupi's demo was a defense department/intelligence application that allowed users to bring in services to be mashed up on demand.

While Ditezen's theme was essentially how to enrich the user exerience with mashups. Crupi took more of an enterprise view of things. He noted that doing mashups is relatively easy to do "when you own the system." But it's not easy when you want to mashup a variety of services from different companies. He noted that companies want to maintain the sort of governance, security, and performance that they have for traditional apps. Accomplishing that is not easy in an Ajax app -- although his app demonstrated that it can be done (being a defense department app, it obviously had a lot of security protections built in).

Some other interesting (at least to me) tidbits that I picked up so far from these sessions, include:

• Companies are looking for frameworks to help them do Ajax apps, but they're demanding so many capabilities that no single framework (or even small set of frameworks) has emerged. Right now there are at least 40 Ajax frameworks in play.
• Most companies are getting into Ajax apps in a very simple way by just including an Ajax snippet such as Google suggest on a web page.
• Gartner claims that by 2010 at least 60% of new development projects will use Rich Internet Application technologies (like Ajax).

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