Ajax According to Zimbra’s Executive

A few days ago, the Web Builder 2.0 conference was held in Las Vegas. It has drawn different programmers from different parts of the country as the conference features different speakers know to have an impact in the industry especially in Web 2.0.

One of the speakers featured in this event is Scott Dietzen. He is currently the President and Chief Technological Officer of Zimbra. The software has received buzz a few months ago when the company was purchased by search engine giant Yahoo for US$350 million. Before it was purchased, it was the biggest communications and collaboration device in universities. Students often use Zimbra as their personal tool as this software is an Outlook/IM/collaboration software. Zimbra is also known to pack a great Ajax coding, offering more security and better interface compared to other newly created Ajax-based software and sights. It doesn’t come as a surprise then that the speech of Scott Dietzen is all about Ajax. In this conference he pointed out the good and the bad site of Ajax and what could be its role in the future of the internet. According to Dietzen, Ajax made rich internet application even better. In fact, he boldly claims that there is no other way to create better RIAs other than Ajax. “There's no other way to deliver a richly interactive experience on the Web. If you want the Web look and feel and the ability to mash up all sorts of other Web technologies, I think AJAX is the best fit.” This was clearly shown in Zimbra as it offers simple yet very effective interface. If you come to think of it, Dietzen’s claim has some veracity. Developers have to worth through Ajax if they want to create a program that’s beneficial not only because of its functions and but also because of its ability to look good with all that complications of the functions. However, Ajax has been plagued again and again by different attacks. Cross-site scripting among browsers is just one of the holes exploited by hackers. Although some of it has been fixed in bigger Ajax based website, it doesn’t guarantee in smaller independent developers. Other than cross-site scripting, there are other problems that needs to be answered. “The goal for rich Internet applications at least ought to be to deliver the same level of security that we've delivered for Web applications because to deliver less undermines user confidence in various ways.” The challenge of security in browsers is even bigger when it comes to offering Ajax. However, since Ajax has been launched two years ago, different browsers have been updated to be faster and better offering better security for Ajax-based websites. “Safari 3 is dramatically better. Internet Explorer 7 offers a two to four times improvement in JavaScript execution for Zimbra over Internet Explorer 6,” said Dietzen. The Zimbra president also offered his thoughts in offline Ajax which is probably one of the hottest things right now in the web. Although it’s still young as most developers only focus on web-based Ajax. Google gadgets and other offline toolkits make it possible for offline Ajax based technologies to prosper in the future.