Was AJAX Really Ever The Savior?

A couple of years ago, the buzzword in all the trade magazines was AJAX. AJAX was the key to resource, bandwidth and user experience improvements. It wasn't long after that every manager of every development team, or rather managers of development team's customers, were asking for AJAX everything.

Shortly after that I started playing with it, as one manager was breathing down the neck of my manager, who started breathing down my neck, to get them some AJAX. Often times the original requester didn't even really know what it was, what it did, or how it did it, they just new it was all the rage in the trade mags.

The last couple contracts I have been on have been very AJAX powered, which on the whole doesn't bother me, and generally is quite cool, as I am a fan of the technology, but it sometimes does get used counter productively. It's not even (and wasn't then) a new technology, it was simply given a name and process by mixing technologies that already existed.

So, where is AJAX useful? Where is it a hindrance? Why would it ever be a hindrance?

First, look at what AJAX is, it makes it possible to make server side processing done from a client side script and populate the results of that processing in a div on the page. So it makes it possible to basically refresh only part of the page, not the whole thing, saving bandwidth, possibly unnecessary resources that may be needed for full page loads.

Problems come in when one tries to do so much via AJAX that the browser bookmarking functions become worthless, or, using it when it creates more round trips from client to server than not using it.

I very much like AJAX for mostly small functionality, examples being validating form fields on the fly in registration forms, small rating systems (like the ol' 1 to 10 stars) such as movie review sites have and things like that. I have worked on a couple community sites that use so much AJAX I couldn't properly bookmark forum threads, or having links, such as banner ads, use AJAX to enter click logs, go back to the client, then get the link it should go to and forward the user to the site, creating an additional round trip that wasn't necessary.

Just remember, AJAX/Web 2.0 or whatever your buzzword of choice is, is very cool, and very useful when used properly. Don't go to AJAX by default just because it sound good, because it's not always the right thing to do. Bottom line is use the right tool for the right job, don't use a tool because the acronym will sound cool in a presentation.

Heck, many times you could use the buzzword anyway, the people you are presenting to may well not even know the difference, just the buzzword from the trade mags they read.

Of course I haven't even brought up the possible search engine ranking implications yet, I'll save that for another blog...