Trouble with AJAX Technologies
March 13, 06 by kenrichToday, one of my favorite blogs, Daily KOS implemented some Ajax improvements to their comment system. It allows comments to be collapsed or expanded, entire threads to be collapsed or expanded and also allows members to recommend a comment to others. It puts a lot of the processing on the client-side which should help performance issues with the server.
A lot of people have noticed performance issues with Mozilla Firefox. I happened to be using Firefox and noticed a huge difference between IE 6 and Firefox. Firefox tends to animate the expansion and collapsing of threads whereas IE 6 is so fast it’s as if there’s no animation at all. Not quite sure what the problem is there, but hopefully they will be able to get it fixed soon.
A lot of people are touting Ajax as the wave of the future. It has helped to drive the Web 2.0 dot-com expansion. It’s still too early to tell whether or not these technologies will experience wide-spread adoption. I try to use the technology only on back-end administration applications. This minimizes compatibility issues as demonstrated in the aforementioned site.
One of the most useful applications for Ajax is for building a content manager. I use an ActiveX HTTP control to retrieve a web page for editting content which works great as long as you’re only using IE 6. Hopefully, XML and HTTP extensions will be added to the next version of Javascript so that we no longer need to rely on ActiveX components for performing basic tasks.
