Tales from the Evil Empire

What's the perception from the ASP.NET team on how interested the developer community is in Atlas? Personally, I’m extremely apathetic about the technology and the hype around it. Since the day Atlas was announced, it’s always seemed like an un-innovative attempt to catch-up. Of course, there’s still plenty of confusion about what Atlas is and why you’d want to use it versus client callback (man, is that still around?) and other 3rd party AJAX providers (Ajax.NET, MagicAjax, …). I played with the PDC bits, and was thoroughly put off by the declarative programming samples – it burdens the development process and seems like an “oh isn’t this cool” when it really doesn’t have anything to do with the problem space being solved.

You and I talked at TechEd. I was writing the AJAX.NET documentation and wanted to bounce some ideas off you about client-callback and ajax.. At that point, Atlas wasn’t publicly known (not sure if it was internally known, since client-callback was still the in-thing). Frankly, the ASP.NET team seemed totally disconnected about the topic, and to this day continues to go down an unclear path.

On July 14th you had a wonderful post titled “Some thoughts about server callbacks and Ajax.NET”, in which you identified a possible alignment issue between the ASP.NET team and average developers. To me that should have sent a red flag to Scott and crew, but I’ve never really seen the topic followed up. If you guys think of things one way, but “most users” think differently, then there’s a problem. What checks have been introduced since callbacks to make sure Atlas is better aligned?

To be fair, my exposure to Atlas hasn’t been great. The problem is, I’m not really sure why I need to bother with it. I just don’t see what added-value Atlas will bring to my already-rich XmlHttp toolset. I realize that part of Atlas is another prototype (prototype.conio.net), and that’s great (assuming I don’t want to use prototype for some reason).

About the article, parts of it deserve to get slashdotted and ridiculed. JavaScript isn’t OO? No exception handling? No inheritance? Googling any of these terms “javascript object oriented”, “javascript exception handling” and “javascript inheritance” results in a number of useful hits. There are other quote-worthy things in that article.

Karl, you know what? I think your feedback deserves a full post. I'll do that in a few minutes.