CHAPTER 1 (Php web hosting) INTRODUCTION TO AJAX designing software
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO AJAX designing software but bad at designing user interfaces.8 I could be controversial and state that Ajax applications have stormed in because the applications are built by mature web designers who know more about user-interface design than software design. I do not mean to belittle the web designers; in fact I mean to illustrate that because of them we have these cool applications. If there is one downside to Ajax, it s that you need to be a user-interface designer who is an expert in the domain being presented. Software development is moving from a horizontal approach (general-purpose software) to a vertical approach (domain-specific software). Comparing Ajax to Other Application Types There you have it, the description of the Ajax application. The remaining question is how an Ajax application compares to applications using other technologies and methodologies. To fully understand the ramifications of Ajax, let s put on our software architect s hat and reengineer Map.search.ch in the context of other architectural models. Rich-Client Local Installation In the traditional software model, you download an application, install it, and then execute it. Converting Map.search.ch into a traditional piece of software would require writing a client. The client would have to be written in a platform-neutral language such as Sun Microsystems Java, or a Microsoft .NET language, or the open source Python (if I missed your programming language, for example Ruby, please do not consider it an insult. I just mentioned the languages E B V N that I regularly code in). If the client were written in a language such as C++, then it would need to be recompiled for each platform. Choosing a programming language often is not the difficult part because languages exist on all platforms. The difficult part is how to code the graphical user interface (GUI). Often the problem is deciding whether to code using a GUI toolkit that takes advantage of the platform and therefore is specific to the platform or to use a GUI toolkit that might not be as specific to the platform and might not be able to use all the tricks of the platform, but therefore is cross- platform. The decision the developer makes has significant ramifications. A large percentage of applications are coded by using C++ and the Microsoft Windows GUI toolkit. This means that these GUI applications will most likely execute only on Microsoft Windows. Another choice for Map.search.ch could have been Java. Then the application could execute on multiple platforms, but the Java runtime would need to be installed on each of the platforms. Choose C++ and Windows, and you have one set of problems. Choose Java and multiple operating systems, and you have another set of problems. Sadly, there is no single best solution because each solution has its problems. The last consideration is the data that is used to power the Map.search.ch application. The problem is that there would be a large amount of data. The only possible solution is to distribute the application with a single or multiple DVDs. The client would either install all the DVDs to the local hard disk or reference the DVDs from the computer s DVD drive while doing the DVD shuffle. The DVD shuffle is when the program constantly asks you to switch DVDs for one piece of information, causing much frustration as you are constantly opening and closing the DVD drive. 8. Alan Cooper, About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), p. 21.
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