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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO AJAX E B V N Figure 1-10. Amazon.com Diamond Search To further illustrate the fundamental change of web applications, I will talk about my recent car buying experience. To choose a car, I used the power of the Internet and some specific information sources that rated and compared cars. I used Google to search the car makers for personal experiences and detailed information. Having whittled down my choices to three car makers, I decided to hit the road and visit some dealers. What happened shocked me. All the car dealers rebuffed me because they could not do their half-hour shtick on why I should buy from them. I peppered them with questions that surprised them. It was disappointing, and I was saddened. My wife said, You know, for the car you like, is there another dealer? In fact, there was, and it turned out to be the region s biggest and central dealership. At this dealership, an older gentleman approached us and I again peppered him with questions. His answer was, Ah, you did research. Which car do you want to take for a drive? He did not go into a long spiel but let us control the process, and of course we bought the car. The moral of the story is that the experts on the Internet might be familiar with only certain parameters, but because websites allow these parameters to be compared in an easy-to-use interface, users are more informed. Informed people expect those human experts that they are seeking to have knowledge that goes deeper than their basic parametric comparisons. In other words, car salespeople need to assume that they will have informed clients and therefore must provide some added value to interest a client in purchasing a vehicle. It is more important when building an Ajax application to understand the data being presented and then to design the user interface fitted to the data. In traditional development, it is the other way around. The data is fit to the software because software designers are good at
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12 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO AJAX When you create your own Ajax application, think of the data that you are managing. Think of how that data can be sliced, diced, and made presentable to the end consumer. Getting the data in the right form is half of the battle. The other half is the presentation. Ajax applications operate from the client side and download data streams that can be manipulated or executed. Many will believe that this means people are ready to use the thin client and to always use applications from the network. However, Ajax does not mean the network is the computer. In fact, going back to the original Ajax fundamental concept, it means that a user uses Ajax and REST to get at the data they are interested in and will use that data locally. For example, say I am going to buy a book. I search Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com. Because neither Amazon.com nor Barnes & Noble compare the prices, I need to download the search results and manipulate them locally. In other words, I need to manipulate the search results to get the information I want. What Ajax and REST promote is the people s ability to slice and dice data in a format that is best suited to their requirements. One last point about the data. Throughout this book, XML or HTML content that is XML compliant will be used. Many people might think that XML has its problems and have proposed protocols that are better. Frankly, I think that is plain wrong. The strength of XML is not its ability to encode data in a verbose format. The strength of XML is its ability to be understood by any platform, its ability to be parsed, sliced, and diced by a wide array of tools. To rebuild as sophisticated an infrastructure as XML is virtually impossible because it would be a gargan tuan task. Therefore, when writing your own Ajax and REST applications, stick to XML. Having written on the strengths of XML, there are specific situations where other formats such as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) would work well. E B V N It s About the Navigation Ajax applications have the ability to quickly sift through large amounts of data in a very short period of time in a very reasonable fashion. Contrast this to previous times when people would hire experts, or buy expert magazines that already sifted through the data for the client. Now we have applications to do this automatically because applications have this expert knowledge built in.6 An example is the Amazon.com Diamond Search,7 shown in Figure 1-10. Using the diamond search, a client can select from a series of parameters such as price, quality, and cut to find an appropriate diamond. Typically, comparing these details would have required surfing different sites and performing different queries. Amazon.com, on the other hand, created an easy-to-use program that uses graphical sliders to query and find the diamonds that are of interest. It could be argued that the Amazon.com Diamond Search site could have been reproduced without the fancy graphics or any Ajax technology. Fair enough, that is true, but remember that Ajax is not only about technology. Ajax is also about the Internet economy, and the diamond search utility is an example of creating a dynamic, fun-to-use site. The more time people spend at the site, the more likely they are to buy. You could argue that the Amazon.com Diamond Search makes it unnecessary to seek the advice of a professional. 6. Amazon has introduced Mechanical Turk, which does specific tasks for users, at http://www.mturk. com/mturk/welcome 7. http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/finder/103-8737513-3625466?productGroupID=loose%5fdiamonds
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO AJAX Figure 1-9. Ajax architecture The data is fetched from the server by using a Representational State Transfer (REST)4 architecture style. The essence of REST is to create a simpler web services architecture by using HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). REST is used solely for the transfer of data, and in particular E B V N is used extensively with Ajax applications. The overall idea is to generate content and to have that content filtered and processed. The filtered and processed content serves as an information basis, where another process acts as a client that filters and processes the information. The filtered and processed information acts as an information basis for another client. Content is fluid and constantly modified. In Figure 1-9, the browser seems to be an end point where the data is not filtered or processed any further. However, that is very far from the truth. In an Ajax infrastructure, the data is always in a state of flux. A script can be used to retrieve HTML content that is saved to a file. Another script processes the saved HTML content that could serve as content for a web service. Putting it simply, when writing an Ajax application the data is never final and always in a state of flux. It s About the Data At the time of this writing, many people were working furiously on getting toolkits ready to make it possible to write Ajax applications. In fact, it has been mentioned that Ajax was already invented long before it became popular.5 Although I agree that Ajax has been around a long time, the question is why is Ajax popular now? Mainly because Ajax involves the manipulation of data streams. We have an Internet economy and Ajax makes that economy work better. Let s focus on Google and Map.search.ch. What do both of these sites sell? They don t sell software; they sell data! Map.search.ch sells information about Swiss addresses. Google sells information about basically everything on this planet. The strength of Google is not in the soft ware that it sells or offers, but in the ability to manage and present the data. 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST 5. http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/06/28.html#a10498
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO AJAX E B V N Figure 1-8. Apartment rentals in Montreal The generated results are perfect. As most Montreal people know, when they ask for Montreal, they mean Montreal the island, and Figure 1-8 includes only the island. Additionally, by clicking on one of the found rentals, a balloon appears that gives more details on the rental and if possible some images. The user can easily click on each found location and quickly decide whether it is of interest to them. Ajax Architecture Basics You have a quick definition and some examples that illustrate the basic ideas behind an Ajax application. The next step is to illustrate an Ajax architecture. See Figure 1-9. In Figure 1-9 there is a browser. The browser has two pieces of content: Content 1 and Content 2. Each piece of content is fetched from a different server. Content 2 is fetched from a server that also has two pieces of content, which are also retrieved from separate servers. From an architectural point of view, Ajax implements the Pipes and Filters pattern.3 3. John Vlissides et al., Pattern Languages of Program Design 2 (Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley Professional, 1996), p. 430.
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO AJAX E B V N Figure 1-7. The various Starbucks in Montreal The search results are presented by combining the addresses of the search results with a map. My search was Starbucks Montreal, and some Starbucks were found, which is good. However, also found was a Souvlaki Restaurant, and oddly, National Car and Truck Rental. What we are witnessing is an imperfect search due to imperfect data. In a perfect world, search strings are perfectly and concisely formulated on a perfectly organized database. However, with ever-growing databases that have ever-growing data, searches are not perfect because of time constraints, data organization, and scope. A creative multidimensional Ajax application is the site http://www.housingmaps.com. Housingmaps is an appropriate example because it is an early example of a Web 2.0 application. The purpose of Housingmaps is to allow a user to search for housing rentals. The rentals are based on data from Craigslist, and the maps are provided by Google. If I search for an apartment rental in Montreal, the resulting output is illustrated in Figure 1-8.
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO AJAX Another Ajax Example Another Ajax application that has received plenty of attention is Google Maps, which is illustrated in Figure 1-6. E B V N Figure 1-6. Home page of Google Maps The home page http://maps.google.com is a view of North America. Like map.search.ch, the web application is multidimensional and combines a search with geographic information. Take the example where I am driving in to Montreal and want to know where a Starbucks coffee shop is. In the text box I type in Starbucks Montreal. The results are displayed in Figure 1-7.
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO AJAX 7 For the sake of exploration, let s go back to the web page illustrated in Figure 1-3 and hover over the other circle, which displays a dialog box containing information about the restaurant and is similar to Figure 1-5. E B V N Figure 1-5. Restaurant details near my old address Based on the restaurant details illustrated in Figure 1-5, you could phone and ask for a reservation, menu, or hours of operation. This is another example of Web 2.0, as information is retrieved dynamically from a server without requiring the user to look up the information in a telephone book. With Ajax information is assembled in a multidimensional fashion, that is, the combination of a map with telephone information. The functionality that was illustrated goes beyond restaurants and public transportation. It includes public parking garages, government buildings, and whatever is of interest to the user of the website application.
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO AJAX E B V N Figure 1-4. Web page used to find a public transportation connection from my old address The web page in Figure 1-4 is a link to the SBB, which is the Swiss train service, but the page also includes bus stops. From this page you could plan your travel to another destination based on some date. Note The shifting of focus from one HTML page to another HTML page is not Ajax specific, as that is possible without Ajax. What is interesting, though, is that a user will consider the entire process of finding a connection that clearly involves two websites, as one application. There is a cooperation between the two websites so that the user has a good experience. This shifting of focus is an example of the Internet economy.
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO AJAX E B V N Figure 1-3. Investigation of the bus stop near my old address in Switzerland With the information in the dialog box, you know the details of the busses, trains, or trams that pass by. The dynamically appearing dialog box is Ajax specific because the information within it is dynamically retrieved after you hover over the bus stop circle. In the dialog box the word Sellenbueren is highlighted, indicating that there is more information. If you click the link, a web page similar to Figure 1-4 is generated.
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4 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO AJAX The page changes, and in the map portal a red circle appears along with some smaller colored-in circles and some satellite images of houses. The red circle highlights the house I lived in, and the other smaller circles represent landmarks. The picture generated by Map.search.ch is an aerial view overlaid with a semitransparent street map. The combination is a map that makes it possible to explain where something is in relation to something else. For example, in Figure 1-2 you can see that the house I lived in has a red roof, and to the left seems to be some type of grey complex. The grey complex is a specialty meat company. The multilayer map is not Ajax specific because traditional web applications could have done the same thing. What is Ajax specific is the map s capability to dynamically reconstruct itself as you drag the mouse over a part of the map. As you click and hold the mouse button and drag across the map, Ajax retrieves map pieces from the server. In a traditional web application, you would have clicked buttons to the left, right, top, and bottom of the map to change your view of it. The advantage of the multilayer approach is the user s ability to easily explain directions. Usually we say, Turn left, and on the right is a gas station. It is easy to understand that there is a gas station on the right, but how far down the street? Is it on the corner? Is it one or two houses down the street? However, with Map.search.ch I can say, Turn right, and see on the map the meat company? Well, there is a parking lot, too, right on the map. The person who is receiving the explanation can mentally coordinate their driving to what they expect to see. Using this approach, when they see a gas station on the right, they will know precisely where on the right. The problem of explaining directions is that one person knows the area, and the other does E B V N not. The person who knows the area will highlight things that he remembers and considers important or worse, will explain according to things as he thinks they are. The person who does not know the area will focus on irrelevant things when driving through and hope to find the landmarks explained. With the overlaid map illustrating the color of houses, orientation of fields, and so on, each person has a common base to explain and understand the directions. Let s focus on some other aspects of Map.search.ch. Notice the little blue circle to the northeast of my old house. That little circle represents a bus stop. If you hover your mouse over the circle, a dialog box appears, telling you the bus stop details and starting and ending points of the route, as illustrated in Figure 1-3.
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