How ASP.NET devs are building AJAX apps

Published 21 December 07 10:49 AM | despos

Ran into this post and felt like I had to spread it around.

It discusses the results of a survey regarding how developers are integrating AJAX in their applications. I can't say much about the scientific or non-scientific nature of the survey, but it makes anyway for an interesting reading.

A first comment I have is that I'm kind of surprised to see that the best ranked product in the category of "Powerful suites of controls" is only the 5th favorite option (Telerik). It seems that .NET Web developers prefer tools that help to ajax-ify ASP.NET pages rather than the rich and powerful new frameworks that you have to marry and keep for a project-life-time :)

Thanks to Simone Chiaretta for the nice work. 

 

 

Filed under:

Comments

# JV said on December 21, 2007 05:44 AM:

Toolkits like Telerik cost money and most companies don't want to pay that amount of money for a toolkit, while free alternative toolkits like the Ajax Control Toolkit exist.

However, in most cases, in the end the company has more money spend on creating their own, almost identical, controls then when they would have bought one...

And besides that, lots of developers seem to dislike using 3rd party bought components, they want to stay in control of everything. So it doesn't really suprise me.

# Simone said on December 21, 2007 06:43 AM:

Dino,

I just want to point out 2 things:

1 - the survey is not very scientific: just 4 questions answered by 1011 people. So they could have answered anything. But I trust people, so I hope they answered with grain of salt

2 - There was a similar survey about the usage of Ajax in the broader dev community (Java, PHP, RoR,CF, .NET, Perl and so on) and the first commercial tool was ranked even lower, it was BackBase and was 10th, with only 8%. So I guess this means .NET dev relies more on commercial tools than other kind of developers.

# Michael Schwarz said on December 21, 2007 09:36 AM:

Hi Dino,

what I got as feedback during presentations or at conferences is that a lot of web developers tried to use third-party controls. After a while they noticed that i.e. performance was very bad compared to built it at your own. So they are moving from full featured controls to controls that do only what they need. I think that this is the most common problem of third-party controls.

When you use an server-side only AJAX library and i.e. jQuery or the Yahoo! libs you are fine in nearly every web application you want to build.

Michael

# Shane Milton said on January 29, 2008 02:09 PM:

I think JV hit the main point - why pay money when you can get it for free? Yeah, this is a very narrow view on it (and not mine) but it is a very popular one.

We live in a world of short-term gains while ignoring long-term consequences both in business and with developers (unfortunately but we all see the code from these types of people). Investments are usually fended off because they cost money without a guaranteed short-term gain.

I personally keep my Telerik subscription renewed regardless of who I am working for because I know that the few hundred bucks it costs saves me much more than the few hours that it would take to make that money back. Plus I get to wow people with how quickly and easily I can do some things. It may not be the most processor-efficient solution but it is often the most time-efficient acceptable solution. And almost any application I would consider implementing a third-party AJAX solution into, I guarantee that the time I save implementing the AJAX can be better spent elsewhere in the system providing other improvements.

-Shane

# Philip Dockerman said on June 11, 2008 03:30 AM:

Very nice controls on that Telerik site, but check the viewstate, 54K for the grid and the grid demo brings half a meg over the wire!  That coupled with having to pay for the controls I [would hope] is the reason they're not being used.

Mind you fair amount using ASP.NET Ajax and that's hardly lean ;-)

Leave a Comment

(required) 
(required) 
(optional)
(required)