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AJAX & REA: Article

Moving Beyond AJAX: 2008 Is the Decision Year For RIAs

What's the Best Spear-Carrier for Next-Generation RIA Technology?
By Jeremy Geelan
Article Rating:
February 14, 2008 03:30 AM EST
Reads:
 38,465
Backbase, a company specializing in rich Internet applications, published as long ago as in 2005 a whitepaper entitled "AJAX and Beyond" to explain their Backbase Presentation Client, designed to interact with their Presentation Server.

And some Microsoft developers, while acknowledging that AJAX is a very important piece of the puzzle, and solves many of the problems faced when creating responsive Web user interfaces, claim that AJAX isn't really asynchronous at all when it comes to HTTP requests. ("An AJAX Web request is a synchronous Web request just like any other," writes Brendan Tompkins, for example. "All AJAX solutions really are doing is using the browser's built-in threading - via JavaScript - to make multiple Web requests for you, and then updating the page when the server responds.") Tompkins' notion of "Beyond AJAX" is to use what he calls "real-life honest to goodness asynchronous method invocation on the server."

Securing AJAX
Before we worry about Beyond AJAX, though, there are many developers (and companies) who believe we should first worry about securing the AJAX apps we currently have. A world-beating pioneer of better AJAX security, Billy Hoffman, has even developed a groundbreaking one-day "Bootcamp" that will be premiered at AJAXWorld 2008 East in New York City (March 18-20, 2008).

Among other innovations, Hoffman has a whole new never-before-seen AJAX application that AJAX Security Bootcamp attendees will get to hack against, before using the app just attacked as a catalyst to lead the discussion about how to secure AJAX applications. "The audience will have probably missed some vulnerabilities in the application they just hacked and I will use that to illustrate how hard AJAX can be to QA and how to properly perform QA tests," Hoffman tells AJAXWorld Magazine.

Published February 14, 2008 – Reads 38,465
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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More Stories By Jeremy Geelan

Jeremy Geelan is Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events. He is Conference Chair of the all-new International Cloud Computing Expo series, of the International Virtualization Expo series, of AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo series, and of the long-running SOAWorld Conference & Expo series. He's founder of Cloud Computing Journal, Web 2.0 Journal, AJAX & RIA Journal and other leading SYS-CON titles. From 2000-6, as first editorial director and then group publisher of SYS-CON Media, he was responsible for the development of all new titles and i-Technology portals for the firm, and regularly represents SYS-CON at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of "Power Panels with Jeremy Geelan" on SYS-CON.TV.

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Most Recent Comments
richie rich 01/21/08 03:45:43 AM EST

any application that requires a fair amount of two-way communication of large data sets would probably benefit from a rich client interface