TDMS and Ajax

Data is always the vital component in an Ajax based application. In fact, an application can be judged on its ability to deal with data manipulation as fast as it can while providing an easy interaction with its users. But aside from interaction and functionality, data security is also considered as well.

Ajax has been in trouble a lot of times because of its inability to provide secure functions for its developers. Although strict coding and use of frameworks that improves security, securing the client side programming technique is still a challenge. But Ajax is still considered a remarkable programming technique because of its ability to deal with data online.

The type of formats in data acceptable in Ajax could be in XML, HTML or JSON. XML and HTML are usually adopted to ensure that the application is universally acceptable and could run in most browsers without additional coding.

JSON on the other hand, is the preferred by developers who wanted to improve speed of Ajax and/or JavaScript over browser restrictions. By selecting the right data format, developers ensure speed and accessibility of their application. Although efforts are being made to bridge the advantages of JSON, XML and HTML the current browser conditions stops the said advantage.

But there is another data format that should be thought of by the people who developed ECMAScript. TDMS or Technical Data Management Streaming is a new data format that aims to harness the advantages of different data formats including ASCII and binary data formats.

TDMS could make some changes on how data is extracted from its sources. In current setting, data is read one by one by the application before they are streamed to the user. This setting is very difficult when the data increase significantly. It will eventually require more processing power which will cost website owners.

TDMS aims to assist developers with that problem. Instead of focusing on the entire data before they are presented to the client side, TDMS shortens the scan by providing headers regarding the contents of data needed. Scanning for new data will be faster with the same efficiency.

TDMS even recognizes hierarchy in data which improves the functionality especially in accessing data with a variety of importance and specification. Active streaming from the server to the client side is even possible because of the minimal footprint instead of storing data in the client side for future access.

But implementing TDMS today is still not feasible. The current footprint of XML, HTML and JSON is tolerable enough that could be handled by the current processors and coding. Even large data types could be easily handled and scanning for data is still highly optimized.

However, the future has new challenges in terms of data storage and retrieval and a new technique is must to cater the data related concerns. TDMS might be the answer developers needed in the future when Ajax, JavaScript and other client side programming languages would have to deal with massive data to be stored and retrieved at will.