Why Ajax?

With the emergence of the Web 2.0 and RIA trends, browser plugins marketed as alternatives to Ajax have appeared, including Microsoft's Silverlight™, Adobe's Flex™ and Sun's JavaFX™. Each claim a nearly identical set of benefits in exchange for moving off of the internationally standardized web platform.

It's a bad bet. Here's why.

Ajax has come of age

A rich IDE environment featuring code completion. Step-through debugging. Visual design tools. Diagnostic tools that you can even use in production. Sounds like the toolset being promoted by plugin vendors, right?

No. These are tools that come with SmartClient, and they are in many ways superior to the tools offered by plugin vendors.

Plugin vendors paint a picture of Ajax development that hasn't existed for years, providing hand-picked testimonials from companies that simply took the wrong approach with Ajax - rolling their own from scratch, or picking a featherweight framework that didn't meet their requirements.

The reality is, the cross-browser inconsistencies that plagued early attempts at Ajax have long ago been eliminated for developers using SmartClient, not just for trivial applications, but for the entire enterprise development lifecycle, from design through deep customizations and pixel-perfect visual design requirements.

At the same time, the tools available for Ajax are now excellent, and are increasing in power and scope exponentially as the vast ecosystem around Ajax makes more and more contributions.

Ajax lets you leverage any plugin and the open web

Today, plugins are the best approach for certain use cases, like delivering video. It makes sense to embed plugins within a predominantly Ajax interface to handle these use cases now, but with an approach that will allow you to replace them with the standards of tomorrow.

What does not make sense is using a plugin to provide the entirety of your UI.

Unlike Ajax-based applications, plugin-based applications cannot embed other plugins. If you use Flex for the entire screen, you won't be able to seamlessly embed Java Applets or Silverlight controls, and vice versa. This can make it nearly impossible to integrate with a site or product that relies on a different plugin technology.

With today's increasingly connected and integrated applications, you can't afford this kind of limitation. Tomorrow's requirements will inevitably involve integration with a technology you didn't anticipate. Using Ajax as the foundation of your application puts you in a position to smoothly integrate with anything that runs in the browser.

The reach and simplicity of true zero-install deployment

In the enterprise, security-conscious IT departments lock down plugin versions, prevent new installations or limit which sites can use plugins. It's hard enough to win the right customers and partners without having to argue for a change in IT policy to allow access to your application.

Don't be fooled by statistics that seem to show rapid uptake but don't make distinctions between enterprise and consumer users, or don't make distinctions between versions of plugins. Plugin-based frameworks like Flex and Silverlight require upgrades to versions that are just months old. Meanwhile the world's largest enterprises - the customers and partners you want most - are the exact enterprises that are stuck on very old versions of software for complex legacy reasons.

Well-financed, consumer-targeted media bonanzas and media-rich online shopping experiences have little if any effect on enterprise uptake.

This problem is very real. Isomorphic has multiple customers who, having encountered key prospects who couldn't accept their plugin-based application, rewrote the entire application with SmartClient. 85% adoption sound great, but isn't very comforting when the relationship you want falls into the remaining 15%.

The future is bright for Ajax

The battle for browser market share is back, and with it, fast-paced innovation by browser vendors, including rapid adoption of existing standards and proposals for new ones.

Every feature for which plugins are commonly used - including offline support, video, sound, visual effects, vector graphics and animation - is already incorporated into international standards like HTML5. Recent browsers have already incorporated many of these features, and cutting edge applications are leveraging them when possible to minimize reliance on plugins.

The last round of new browser releases nearly doubled the performance of existing Ajax applications - even though SmartClient already had performance sufficient for advanced RIA interfaces like drag and drop portal dashboards, and dynamic OLAP datacube browsing.

Compare the future of plugins to the future of Ajax. The common plugins are widespread almost solely because they have historically been needed for video and animated advertisements. Reach is already a problem for plugins, and as the reasons to use plugins vanish or become less relevant in the enterprise, there is no compelling use case that can keep the installed base at the level where it is today - and that's already too low.

Reach platforms other than Windows

If you think performance is a good reason to adopt plugin technology, then you'd better only care about Windows, and be ready to ignore mobile devices.

MacOS, Linux and mobile versions of plugins - when they are available at all, and if they are installed, and when they actually work - are typically one-half or one-quarter the speed of their Windows counterparts, and have been benchmarked as substantially slower than Ajax on those platforms.

The reason is obvious - Apple cares much more about Safari performance than Microsoft cares about Silverlight on MacOS. Take any other platform - mobile, Linux, etc - and the story is similar.

The incredibly large installed base of Ajax applications - from slightly enhanced web pages to full-fledged RIAs - naturally implies that a fast, high-quality Ajax-enabled browser engine is the first priority on any given platform. Plugin vendors don't have the bandwidth to create a first-class experience on every platform, or worse, have reasons to leave some platforms as second-class citizens.

When it comes to the basic feasibility of your application - it's reliability and performance - Ajax is the platform that brings real cross-platform consistency, not plugins.

Incremental upgrade and transformational RIAs

The consensus among analysts, industry luminaries and commentators is clear - Ajax is the technology to use when making incremental improvements to existing applications. Similarly, Ajax is definitely the technology to use for sites that require only small amounts of interactivity.

So your organization will be using Ajax.

When Ajax also handles full-blown transformational RIAs, why would you invest in two sets of skills, two sets of tools, perhaps even two sets of server licenses or hardware?

From an enterprise-wide standards perspective, Ajax must be in the mix. There should be a very, very, very compelling and well-researched reason why another technology is worth the investment. When you become familiar with SmartClient, you'll find that that reason just isn't there.

Control over your technology

Plugin vendors tout that their technology is open source or an open source alternative is available. The implied benefit is that if you are desperate you might be able to fix problems yourself.

If a plugin vendor is not interested in prioritizing the fixes or features you desperately need, does having the source code to a plugin really give you options?

If you have the source code to the plugin, you can:

• patch the plugin, on all platforms
• negotiate deals with Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation and Apple to bundle your modified plugin with their browsers
• wait 3 years for sufficient adoption

Don't be fooled by claims of openness. An open source Ajax technology like SmartClient gives you real fallback options in a bad situation, but with plugins, the ability to get a plugin distributed worldwide is the true source of lock-in, and nothing else matters.

In a time of tremendous uncertainty, the sane strategy is to stick to standards-based Ajax technology, leverage the most appropriate plug-ins only when required, and ensure you are in a position to move to standardized technology as it becomes more prevalent.

With a true solution to cross-browser issues, a 7 year track record of success in the world's most demanding business applications, and the world's most complete framework and toolset, the best of breed Ajax technology for enterprise business applications is SmartClient.

Learn more about SmartClient or download the SDK now to get started with SmartClient today.