Formula for Ajax Failure

Ajax is still going strong and the hype will never go down unless a new and a better technique is coming up. So far, what we have seen are variation of Ajax – FJAX, AHAX and SAJAX. Although they are innovation by themselves, we cannot help but thinking that these innovations happened because of Ajax. We just have to wait a little bit for the next big thing.

For now we have to work a little bit better for Ajax’s development. In this state, the developers still has a lot of things to understand to build a highly efficient Ajax based website. There are so many pitfalls in Ajax and one flaw will mean an unsecured website open for all hackers to exploit.

Here are some of the things that could be left out which will endanger your website:

Changing POST with GET – These two actions are sometimes changed and at first glance, these are just words with almost the same function so it would not do any harm to the application. But take a look at it closely and you will see why GET should be considered red only for very important functions. POST is setting the information for others to see.

On the other hand GET is extracting information from the server while influencing the whole website and application. When you use POST, the information will be there but will never have any influence of the application. This is safer and will leave lesser footprint compared to GET which will influence the whole application.

The temptation to use GET is great since it is really easy to configure with the application. Use POST as much as possible. Although you might have to command almost every function to react to the POST, the security it will do is worth it.

Forgetting about Spiders – There are so many things an Ajax-based could do. But not everything. One of them is the inability to be crawled by search engines. We are not just talking about Google but any search engine will never have the ability to crawl through the text.

If your website is not popular enough, nothing will be searched and the texts will never be crawled. Texts are always an important part of any website so nothing could be crawled when nothing is written – at least in format.

ASP.NET’s Data Type – This situation is unique to ASP.NET framework. This type of framework does not ensure any JavaScript developer that their codes will work in their framework. Unfortunately, ASP.NET cannot or does not want to recognize the data types from JavaScript so you have to work your way around it.

Fortunately, only the really lazy ones will never work around this problem. There are data converters that will aid the developers so that the data will be recognized in ASP.NET. Although it is another step in web development, converters are the only way JavaScript developers could build a website for ASP.NET.

Ajax gives us an infinite possibility of what we can do. But we have to remember that data security is essential for a successful Ajax based website.