The unrecognized AJAX developer

13/08/2009. Matias Bagini

Software has evolved significantly since the 80s. GUIs, DBMSs, Internet and new languages transformed green screen programs into nice multiuser applications.

Nevertheless, the advent of HTML as the standard UI platform at the beginning of this century ended with one of the greatest improvements that software development had achieved: productivity.

Building enterprise software during the 90s was surprisingly faster than doing it today using the HTML/AJAX way (of course, these guidelines don't apply to ALL projects).

So, a typical day in the life of an AJAX developer is hard. One of the proofs is what I call "The unrecognized AJAX developer".

This happens when the end-user wants something difficult to implement in AJAX. So you spend many hours/days to do it. And finally you get it working. You're proud. You think you have created the best piece of software in the world. Your mates (developers) are wowed. They say "how did you do that?" But you show it to the final user who just says "OK, that's OK".

You have worked really hard, just to solve a small problem for the end user, a must be.

Just think when your client asks you to build an application, with a tree, where you can do some kind of drag and drop, and then a listing should be updated in real time... he's so used to his desktop ERP that he thinks that moving this functionality to the web is trivial. And finally you spend a lot of time, you get it working. You're proud. But the final user can't see the value. After all, he (without being a computer science expert) could have done something similar in Microsoft Access in a few hours...

Taking too much time to solve basic problems results in less productivity.

Luckily, many platforms are emerging to bring the old 4GL/RAD productivity back again into the AJAX world. In the next years, they will change the way we develop software.