Why use AJAX in the enterprise?

It appears that Forrester Research Inc may have upset a few AJAX people out there by claiming that power users are less than impressed with AJAX in the enterprise (see "AJAX-powered Web apps disappoint power users, Forrester says"). That's not really news at Altio., for a long time we have been aware that the Enterprise power user can be extremely demanding.

Creating a Enterprise application for the browser requires the following at a minimum

• Responsive user interface


• Ability to work with large volumes of data


• Provide all the features expected from a desktop application, which probably means interacting with other desktop applications.

The computerworld article quotes:

" most AJAX frameworks tend to keep all real business logic on the server as opposed to local systems, user interactions may require a roundtrip communication between the browser and server for each input field"

I'm not sure how true this is, I guess JavaScript would need to do this to ensure it maintains performance. Altio does not have this issue and allows for client side validation without any additional performance overhead associated with server roundtrips.

"Some large applications could easily have 50 fields on a single screen."

This statement seems to have caused quite a stir, resulting in a number of strongly worded comments. I would agree that 50 fields does seem like an extreme GUI and probably breaks a lot of usability and GUI design rules but I have seen a number of Call Centre application both in the UK and Far East which have a lot of complex screens with many input fields, including editable lists on one screen (maybe not 50). Sometimes the nature of the business domain requires this. So technical purists who maybe have little business knowledge probably needed to tame their comments a little. It is the business that drives IT demand, it is down to people working in technology to meet the business demands, not enforce technical constraints on business users.

"As a result, AJAX developers told Forrester that they had to reduce real-time input validation compared with traditional rich clients to meet performance requirements. Real time input validation is a top priority for power users, the report said."

Well why not consider Applet based technologies. Applets provide a rich user experience all within a browser, the best of both worlds. I was surprised that the report summary only discussed Adobe and Microsoft Technologies. This shows a lack of knowledge of what Sun are doing in Java 6 with the new Java plugin and Java FX.

Altio and AJAX are similar in that they both interpret the business logic - Altio has it's own XML meta language that defines the logic while AJAX uses Javascript. Altio does provide a flexible means to manipulate data and interact with screens, in addition to this it comes with its own integration layer enabling rapid application development.

It could be argued that Applets have restricted memory because of the Java sandbox, but this will no longer be the case with Java 6 where it will be possible to request more memory from the operating system.

Overall I feel a lot of Analysts and the developer community are ignoring Applets as a technology due to its poor history. I feel that Applets should be used in Rich Enterprise Web Applications, and Sun need to advertise the power of Applets with the new support of Java 6. There are enough Java developers and using a tool like Altio abstracts away the complexity of understanding Swing and AWT.