With AJAX, we can really have a Rich Client
Wow, I have been reading and learnng as much as I can about AJAX over the past several weeks. There are a few things that I think are really enabling the Rich Client experience.
- A is for Asynchronous. The ability to do things asynchronously without forcing the user to wait on a response is awesome. This asynchronous set of operations is for calling server methods
- Saves UI perspective for a user without causing the user to go back to the top of the page on a refresh. Yeah, I know about SmartNavigation in ASP.NET, but this is way better in my opinion.
- The annoying flash. Click on a button and only send back the necessary information without having to respost all form elements, including the ASP.NET viewstate.
- Saving files. The ability to cache the data, or send the correct URL to someone else, will be a major issue. While this has not been a 100% worked out, the potentials are incredible.
Just think, if it was not for Microsoft and their ActiveX capabilities to launch the client side MSXML or SOAP ActiveX objects in the browser, we might not have this capability. From this, the other browser makers implemented XMLHttpRequest. Now, we are off to the races.
Wally