AJAX-Tips
Agnostic Ajax? That’s exactly what Ted Farrell has to say when it comes to addressing the problems of Web 2.0 for Enterprise. To carefully explain this, let’s take a look at the pressing problem of the Web 2.0 for enterprise. Web 2.0 for customers is an easy task and there are thousands maybe millions of developers working out there to create the possible solution to any problem the customers are posted. Companies such as Google and Amazon are able to answer any concerns of the customer. Even though they spend millions of dollars just to cater to the whims of the customers, it can be achieved. On the other hand, Enterprise 2.0 has still a long way of getting where its customer based counterpart has gone. For one, there aren’t enough developers who wanted to spend time creating an enterprise solution. According to Farrell, “if you look at the consumer space, the problems are much simpler, the environments are much simpler and you can create functions that you can't create in the enterprise space," The user interface for customers is really easy and can cater to a lot of problem any customer might imagine. But Enterprise solution is just not the same. Instead of giving a simple yes or “we’ll make one” answer, Enterprise solution providers will have to go through a lot of changing if they wanted their technology to be good for the 2.0 generation. But it doesn’t mean it will be placing Ajax and other mash-ups in its technology. It’s a challenge to this generation since Ajax is almost an imperative to the every solution and program. For Farrell, even with the pressing development, the Enterprise world is not ready until today. “A lot of people talk about mashups and Ajax where they'll just have everything exposed as Web services with user interfaces built on top of them to mash the information together…That's not always possible in the enterprise space because a lot of the legacy systems haven't broken up the data that way or the UIs are so complex you can't really separate the two. In those cases you generally want to use something like a portlet in your page. In the Ajax space, JavaScript access to portlets and data sharing is very difficult and in a lot of cases, it's actually impossible” Basically, agnostic Ajax means developers in the Enterprise world will have to think twice before implementing any mash-ups or Ajax based programs. There are those that might have developed a technology to contradict the statement but you have to understand it from the point of view for total customer satisfaction. Ajax and other mash-ups are not that stable yet to be trusted by various companies. Yes, Enterprise 2.0 will eventually reach the status of using Ajax technologies but for now, we just have to live with the simple idea of getting things done with simple User Interface. The term “agnostic Ajax” was used by Ferrell in his latest speech in the AjaxWorld Conference in Santa Clara, Calif.
