You Were Wrong!

Six years ago, I was using the Microsoft remote scripting toolkit. The technique is now called AJAX. I envisaged applications that behaved more like desktop applications – I even built a demo to show online chat in a browser. There was nothing difficult or sophisticated about what I was doing, but everybody seemed to think it was a bad idea.

One of the objections was that these remote calls I was making would suck up all of the available bandwidth on the server. I thought this was silly. Why reload a whole page when you can simply fetch the part of the page you need – I thought the “page” metaphor was great for web sites, but it was not useful for applications.

I was so very pleased to see AJAX tack off. I was also pleased to find this article that says what I said: AJAX style applications decrease bandwidth. Check it out. Today, as a gift to myself, I want to say to those people: You were wrong! I was right! (Here’s a big friendly old raspberry for you! FFTHHAAAP!)