After sitting through half a day of MIX07, I have finally seen something that crystallized my disquiet about AJAX.
Having seen the tortured workflow involved in developing any substantial Javascript-based web app and wondered about a whole new class of as-yet-undiscovered client-side Javascript attacks on AJAX applications, I have been loathe to advocate for wholesale AJAX adoption.
What made me see the light was Silverlight. I had been mildly interested in Silverlight, and knew that a cross-platform version of the CLR was involved. But what put it over the top for me was seeing remote, interactive debugging of a Silverlight application running on Safari using Visual Studio.NET on Vista in C#.
Also, although you do not need any Microsoft infrastructure on the server in order to serve up Silverlight applications, the possibilities of integration with ASP.NET seem really exciting.
OK...so less of the marketing hyperbole. Certainly AJAX is going to continue to be important, but... there really is a new kid on the block.
Check it out
posted @ Monday, April 30, 2007 11:19 AM