Just over a year ago I posted a very short post titled Premature Ajaxulation. It was so short I am going to post it in it’s entirety just so you don’t have to click through:
Ajaxing your web-application too quickly is rarely a satisfying experience!
At the time I was working for a company that was undertaking a HUGE Ruby on Rails project. It was a project I was starting to think was doomed. Somehow the entire project was being written in such a way that the location bar would almost never change. Everything was an AJAX call. I was frustrated because my calls to get the app working first and get it working ‘neat’ second were going unheard.
With statzen I have the opportunity to do things the way I feel is best. Luckily I have close to 10 years of professional software development mistakes under my belt to help guide those decisions.
I really like what can be done with JavaScript and XmlHttpRequest, but I don’t want to sacrifice usability for a slick package (truth be told I want both but it is usability over slick). As I am working on the reporting element of statzen I am shying away from AJAX as much as possible. Permanent, clean, readable URLs are too important. I want people to be able to copy and paste a URL that makes sense into an email or IM and share how cool statzen’s reporting is.
There are times that AJAX is being used, but it is only after there is a clean, reusable URL developed underneath. That big project I was talking about last year, it pretty much failed. I don’t know if the final nail was ever pounded into the coffin, but when I left the project was getting further and further behind and requiring more and more resources. I doubt if it every saw the light of day which is really a shame. It was a very ‘neat’ application. Luckily, I (and I assume every other developer on the project) learned a lot.
