Posted on 03/13/2005 11:39:17 PM PST by baseball_fan
Meet Ajax, the technology powerhouse. For years, it has been living indolently on your computer, never really doing much of anything.
In the past few months, though, computer programmers, most notably those at Google, have begun to wake up Ajax and put it to work. And as a result, the computer industry may never be the same.
Ajax is a recently coined name for a dense mouthful of software technologies that are built into Web browsers. The most important of them are JavaScript, a computer-programming language; dynamic HTML, which is a way of displaying information on a screen; and XMLHTTP, a procedure a Web browser can use to very quickly get information from a central server.
To see what they are capable of, go to maps.google.com, zoom into a location, click inside the map and then drag the image around. It's Ajax that is moving the map for you, scrolling it much faster than you're probably used to on the Web.
Browsers have been getting and displaying information since the Web began. What's new is that Ajax lets them do so in a speedier way. In the past, to change even a small part of a Web page required reloading the entire page. But Ajax knows to fetch only the part of the screen that needs changing -- like the edges of the Google map window as you move around.
Because less information is being sent from the main server, things move more quickly. That takes Ajax applications a big step toward the Holy Grail of having the kinds of speed and responsiveness in Web-based programs that's usually associated only with desktop software, like Microsoft Office.
...everything required for it is standard, generic software that isn't owned by any company and that exists in every browser...
snip...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
If you haven't yet tried Google Maps, do it straightaway. Marvelous technical tour-de-force. I'd wondered how they did the drag trick; this article answers that question.
Hats off to Google for that, and for whatever comes next.
The almost-as-obvious question is when the 'software' hits the fan... from the zillions of overlapping and interlocking patents and copyrights. Get a big box of popcorn, could be quite a show. Unless, of course the Feral Gummit is subject to the UN scheme to control the Internet by then, in which case all American shareholder bets are off....
It's pretty abrasive. This seems a ridiculous article. The reason the map loads 'at the edges' is because it is segmented into small squares. If an image has already loaded into the cache, it doesn't have to load again.
AJAX? What the?
Do you think? From the article it says: "...everything required for it is standard, generic software that isn't owned by any company and that exists in every browser..."
Like the regular Google feature of typing in a street address and getting offered a Yahoo or Mapquest map.
Hope they don't make that feature go away.
"Like the click and drag feature, but the maps suck. Don't list a lot of street names."
I tried two separate addresses in two separate cities, and it had every street name listed once I zoomed in far enough.
Most of what is considered generally "free" has EULAs that nobody ever reads and rights that nobody (with the exception of a few like Real Networks, Microsoft, Adobe, SCO and Apple) have YET found worth litigating. But Open Source code EULAs (and they are many, each with its own terms and usage conditions) = lots of trapdoors and gatekeeper/royalty or patent acquisition fees for a relatively new player in the field. And Google now has VERY deep pockets. Could be interesting.... I might be wrong.... beware geeks bearing GNU gifts. And their (often) pro-Marxism attorneys....
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&as_qdr=all&q=%22patent+minefield%22&btnG=Search
from Slashdot (bold emphasis added):
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday March 03, @05:10PM from the google-os-rumors-aflutter dept.
galdur writes "Microsoft Watch reports Marc Lucovsky, one of Microsoft's key Windows architects has defected to Google. His confidence in Microsoft's ability to ship software seems to have waned, too. Some hypothesize Google working on an OS but in the wake of Google's inroads into Ajax tech applications (GMail, Suggest, Maps), I think Google may have other plans for the chief software architect for Microsoft's .Net My Services ("Hailstorm")" CT Many users are reporting 404s on the Microsoft Watch article, but its working fine for others. Hopefully they'll fix their server soon.
Google's map has 13 street names versus 30 plus on the Mapquest map, including geographic features, and directions of one way streets. Maybe I'm in too dense a city area.
I know it's a new feature of Google and it might get better, but I'm sticking with Mapquest for now.
"Google's map has 13 street names versus 30 plus on the Mapquest map, including geographic features, and directions of one way streets. Maybe I'm in too dense a city area."
I find if I zoom in all the way I lose some street names, but if I zoom out just one increment, they are all there.
Impressive!
"Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web."
and
"Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach. All of the major products Google has introduced over the last year — Orkut, Gmail, the latest beta version of Google Groups, Google Suggest, and Google Maps — are Ajax applications. (For more on the technical nuts and bolts of these Ajax implementations, check out these excellent analyses of Gmail, Google Suggest, and Google Maps.) Others are following suit: many of the features that people love in Flickr depend on Ajax, and Amazon’s A9.com search engine applies similar techniques.
These projects demonstrate that Ajax is not only technically sound, but also practical for real-world applications. This isn’t another technology that only works in a laboratory. And Ajax applications can be any size, from the very simple, single-function Google Suggest to the very complex and sophisticated Google Maps. At Adaptive Path, we’ve been doing our own work with Ajax over the last several months, and we’re realizing we’ve only scratched the surface of the rich interaction and responsiveness that Ajax applications can provide...."
Just got done reading the article (print version). Methinks Ajax could speed up FR significantly.
Bingo. So much for the free lunch.
Javascript is a superb language, btw. I wee bit quirky in some aspects, but all great languages have that quirkiness -- Fortran, C, Basic, APL, even the very reasonably despised "Forth".
"A wee bit quirky"
Zooming in all the way definitely has bugs, but the google map of my area has several streets correct that are wrong on every map I've previously seen. These are streets that are incomplete in fact but are shown as connected on most maps.
And I find Google maps much more readable.
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