TechnologyDriven

Markus Eisele did an interesting speech at the W-JAX conference last year about “Chances and Risks of AJAX in Enterprise Applications”.

Here you can find the presentation:
http://technologydriven.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/w-jax_eisele.pdf

Unfortunately it’s only available in German, so I try to give you the key-points in the following.

First, Markus described the characteristics of (inter-)”enterprise” applications, compared to e.g. public web-applications like flickr or Google:

• Instrument for business performance
• Robustness and reliability
• Cost-effectiveness (TCO)
• Performance requirements
• Handling of mass data
• Testability
• Proven tools, methodologies and software-architectures for software-development (e.g. MVC)
• …

Concerning all this, a new technology like AJAX offers some chances but also some challenges, namely:

• Centralized administration of clients (perhaps browser-versions 4.x) and security settings which prohibit the extensive use of JavaScript
• Heterogeneous client-infrastructure (PCs, hand-helds, kiosk-systems, …)
• Lack of tools to develop, debug and test AJAX- (or JavaScript-)based applications
• Danger to do business-logic within the presentation layer
• AJAX is there to increase usability, but it not always does (print web-page, bookmarking, browser back-button, …)

To encounter those challenges, Markus recommended the server-side development and generation of AJAX-code within standardized frameworks like J2EE/JSF or .Net. As suitable areas to use AJAX within enterprise apps he identified:

• Asynchronous loading/update of worklists within workflow-systems
• Complex forms (dynamic loading of page-fragments instead of clicking through a lot of pages)
• Dynamic, on-demand loading of data-records for tree-structures and similar
• Client-side sort and filtering of datasets
• Automatic text-completion in input-fields (e.g. Google Suggest)

He finished with a quote from Ray Valdes (Gartner):

“The bottom line is it [AJAX] can result in an
improved user experience, which offers
significant business value, but that is not
automatic. Many developers will do what they
always do—they don’t understand user-centric
design. We’ve seen this with Java applets.
We’ve seen this with Flash.”