Well our poll asking whether Ajax is a Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology resulted in 70% of you saying YES, it is a RIA technology. 22% said no and 8% admitted they don’t know. Total poll contributers was 560.
The conversation in the post was revealing though – i.e. it revealed it is a very confusing issue 🙂 My favorite comment was from Josh, who compared Ajax to pepperoni on a pizza:
“It seems to me what a lot of people in this thread are saying is akin to a pizza maker saying pepperoni isn’t a pizza ingredient because you don’t have to use it.
Yes, you can make a pizza without pepperoni, and yes you can make a web app without Ajax. But if you make a pepperoni pizza, then pepperoni is a pizza ingredient. If you make an RIA with Ajax, then Ajax is a Rich Internet Application technology.”
I love pepperoni pizza, so that argument swayed me. In any case, a majority of you seem to agree that you can create a desktop app-like experience using a non-plugin or download technology like Ajax. On this topic, Alex Iskold mentioned in his latest post that Ajax as a trend seems to be on a downturn. He showed the following graph to illustrate it:
Alex reasoned that it’s because “we are seeing the rise of libraries like jQuery that hide Ajax and take it to a whole new level. So the new trend we can perhaps call MetaAjax.”
I wonder if some developers out there can explain, in laymens terms if possible, what this MetaAjax is and whether it will be able to ‘compete’ with the likes of Flex and WPF? That is: will rich, interactive web pages and apps in 2007 and beyond be increasingly done using Adobe or Microsoft technologies? Or will vendor-independent approaches like jQuery or Ajax keep up.
Another way to ask this is: what RIA technologies will Google use in 2007 and beyond, to perhaps push interactivity beyond the current Gmail or Google Maps experience?
Pepperoni pizza pic: Jym Ferrier
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)