AJAX - because there is no alternative

Say what???!

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AJAX is the most promising and coolest thing happening in the web world at the moment – a part of the web 2.0 movement!
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If you read any web 2.0 blogs it seems that IT IS the web 2.0 movement. Anyway, it represents a paradox in my opinion.

Suddenly the AJAX wave comes sweeping from behind and now anybody who is anybody must implement it in some way, not to fall behind the hype of course. The tools are coming along slowly now – Ajax.net and Atlas to name some. The problem is that the development time needed to implement AJAX is still so extensive (and thereby expensive), that it may not be desirable in many situations.

The entire idea behind AJAX is to make the web act more like a windows (and linux, mac etc.) application. This is the paradox. We spend more and more money developing websites that act more and more like a windows application, when we could have used our time and efforts on developing distributed windows applications (it could be .NET smart clients). We try to come as close as we can with the help of AJAX, but we know that we will never get there. But still, we put so much effort in a lost cause. Somehow it makes me feel sad...

The problem is that there is no alternative. Smart clients are not widely supported, and will not leave the intranet and go world wide web anytime soon. No technology is likely to revolutionize the way we use the internet in the near future, so we’ll have to keep trying to make the most of it – even though it is a lost cause in the end.