Microsoft Releases Atlas

Jason Lind writes "Much earlier than anticipated, Microsoft announced the release of Atlas this afternoon at MIX 06. For those who don't know, Atlas is Microsoft's AJAX API for ASP.NET 2, which they claim will greatly reduce the effort in developing AJAX style applications on their platform."

If it's anything like the rest of ASP.net...

[CastrTroy]

If it's anything like the rest of ASP.net, It will require that you use Microsoft's wonderful web technology, with __viewstates, and other wonderful features. You won't be able to customize it nearly enough to do a professional job, and will only work for really quick and sloppy applications that don't really need AJAX anyway. I use ASP.Net on a daily basis. We've found the best thing to do is to ignore all the form/component stuff that microsoft has built, and just use tools we have built ourselves, which although they do many of the same features, are much more extensible and easier to use.

Ajax is a flash in the pan

[jimmyhat3939]

Personally I think the whole Ajax thing is overblown and will die down in the next year or two.

Are there good uses for Ajax? Sure. Google Maps is probably the single best example out there at the moment, and I would expect some more to show up soon.

BUT, will Ajax supplant the client app as the workhorse of productivity applications? Not a chance:

• Ajax requires all communication be serialized using a Javascript callback scheme that requires extensible but ultimately limiting xml communication between client and server.
• To get good performance, Ajax forces you to code a front-end application using JAVASCRIPT. Now I've coded some pretty complicated Javascript stuff, but it's just not the right language for writing full-featured applications. It's barely even object oriented, weak typed, etc. And debugging it is a disaster.
• If instead you decide to have the server make all the UI decisions for you ("put this text here, that box there"), that's fine except you'll see lag anytime you do anything. Imagine trying to update an entire column of data in Ajax Spreadsheet. The server has to send down exactly what to put in each cell and do all the computations for you before you see anything. Google Maps has this problem - I often see white boxes, unrefreshed boxes, etc. and I'm using the latest Firefox!

The funniest thing for me about Ajax is it basically is just doing what Java Applets can do, only Java is better. WTF?!?!

Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer....

[everphilski]

Easy Programming Model ASP.NET makes building real world Web applications dramatically easier. ASP.NET server controls enable an HTML-like style of declarative programming that lets you build great pages with far less code than with classic ASP or technologies like PHP or JSP. Best of all, ASP.NET pages work in all browsers - including Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer... from the official website [atlas.asp.net]. Sounds kinda cool.

AJAX is bad

[jjeffrey]

I really dislike AJAX, for the following reasons:

1: Does anyone know of any significant javascript code which works on two different browsers without having to have conditionals based on the user agent?

2: Most AJAX applications break accessibility rules, which are law in many countries (including the UK, where I am).

3: AJAX provides another attack vector on websites. Look at the myspace worm. I know that comes down to bad programming, but still it's another chance to miss something.

4: A number of companies block javascript at the firewall - trust me, it's true. Imagine how well an AJAX site will work there!

5: Javascript is not available in all UA's (e.g. Lynx) - I firmly believe that no website should ever NEED javascript - in fact in my sites I avoid it all together.

I wish people would forget about stuff like this and concentrate on at least getting VALID html and CSS in their sites, preferably using at least semi recent standards like XHTML 1.0. Eh slashdot coders? I mean you!!!

Key words are...

[Anonymous Coward]

The key phrases here are 'claim' and 'their platform'. What about cross platform web applications I ask you?!

"which they claim will greatly reduce the effort in developing AJAX style applications on their platform."

How about ACID2 complicance in IE7 or implementing the features developers are asking for:

http://annevankesteren.nl/2005/03/ie7-wishlist [annevankesteren.nl]
http://news.com.com/Next+Explorer+to+fail+Acid+tes t/2100-1032_3-5813897.html [com.com]
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/03/09/391362 .aspx [msdn.com]

Re:Microsoft learning its lesson?

[Anonymous Coward]

Something from MS that works on MS competitors too? That's unusual. I mean, there's probably a catch in there somewhere, like with ActiveX.

Opera is still struggling, but Firefox compatibility seems to be a priority on their new Live [live.com] services as well (btw, I like that finally someone is trying to move the search ui forward from last decade, even though it takes some getting used to..)

Re:Ajax is a flash in the pan

[AKAImBatman]

My thoughts exactly. I cringe to think to what it would be like to maintain an entire Unix application that did everything in X11. Even with a development environment that was built to support X11, I think it would still be a nightmare. X11 is good for little apps like calculators and graphical terminals, but is not the best way to do the entire application.

Or, on the other hand, maybe we could make widget libraries that do all the heavy lifting of X11 for us? Then we could program to the widget libraries rather than the uber-complex X11 drawing library! Genius!

The same is true of AJAX. Right now, everyone is programming at the lowest level. What AJAX needs is a higher level set of widgets that can accelerate development. Mozilla took the XUL path, but that won't work for cross-browser applications. We need a general-purpose widget library written using the standard HTML DOM. Then AJAX will become a quick and easy option.

Unfortunately, Atlas isn't it. This is just a collection of custom tags to simplify and standardize ASP programming.

Re:If it's anything like the rest of ASP.net...

[Anonymous Coward]

__doPostBack() doesn't actually do anything if the user has javascript disabled, so the viewstate crud should not be used for anything serious (eg: ecommerce). Sadly these prebuilt components are targetted at developers who don't know any better.

Re:AJAX is bad

[AKAImBatman]

1: Does anyone know of any significant javascript code which works on two different browsers without having to have conditionals based on the user agent?

As someone else pointed out, you test the function or member to see if it exists. If not, you patch the browser on the fly. The only IE specific code I have is code to patch it for DOM Events and up-to-date String functions. This is possible because you can do something like this in Javascript:

if(!String.prototype.slice)
  String.prototype.slice = function(start, end) {...};

These sorts of patches are only necessary for IE (Opera, Safari, and Mozilla all seem to follow standards), and will automatically deactivate if Microsoft ever fixes their out-of-date-and-can't-even-support-a-ten-year-old- standard browser.

2: Most AJAX applications break accessibility rules, which are law in many countries (including the UK, where I am).

If by "most" you mean "Google", then I agree with you. It's not necesary to break accessibility rules, though many text-to-speech browsers are so far behind that it's nearly impossible to support them with anything newer than Netscape 3.0 code.

3: AJAX provides another attack vector on websites. Look at the myspace worm. I know that comes down to bad programming, but still it's another chance to miss something.

JavaScript exploits are nothing new. You might be vulnerable even if your site doesn't use a shred of JavaScript itself. i.e. It's entirely a problem with the browser -> site communication, and what your site allows/disallows.

4: A number of companies block javascript at the firewall - trust me, it's true. Imagine how well an AJAX site will work there!

Say, wha? That's the first I've ever heard of such draconian restrictions. Such firewall rules would break a large chunk of the internet for their users. I sincerely doubt that this will be a major problem.

5: Javascript is not available in all UA's (e.g. Lynx) - I firmly believe that no website should ever NEED javascript - in fact in my sites I avoid it all together.

I hate to break it to you, but apps designed to use AJAX are too complex for Lynx to render effectively anyway. When you make an AJAX app, you make a thin-client application that's intended for delivery over the Internet. The 0.001% of the net that refuses to surf with anything other than Lynx will simply have to not use your site. The rest of the world will be reaping the benefits of thin client applications.

Re:Where's the beef?

[AKAImBatman]

I was hoping someone would prove me wrong. I just couldn't believe that Microsoft would call it AJAX without it being AJAX! Your mention of "UpdatePanel" did the trick. I couldn't find it in the API anywhere.

Microsoft needs to be modded -5 bad site design. So if you go to atlas.asp.net (from the summary), does it take you to atlas? No. I was looking at the standard ASP controls [atlas.asp.net] that you can get to through the "Tutorials" link. No wonder I was confused! Atlas is actually located here [asp.net].

The "real" atlas looks more interesting. Half the documentation is broken (e.g. all the "controls" point to the System.UI.Button docs), and I've already managed to find at least one [asp.net] IE-only example, but this is a bit more of what I had in mind.

The whole documentation is so rushed at the moment that it's hard to make a reasonable evaluation. But from what I can tell, Microsoftt is a lot closer, but not quite there yet. We'll have to keep an eye on this one. :-)

Released? Or just another preview?

[xbrownx]

The article doesn't say, but the official site seems to make it sound just like the March CTP (Community Technology Preview) has been released... ..In other words, not the final version, which makes this headline incorrect.

Re:Why the un-searchable names?

[booch]

Um, I don't think Microsoft sells a product named Sequel. I think you're thinking of "SQL Server". Most people like to pronounce the "SQL" as "sequel". And other non-Microsoft technologies are problematic to search for: C, C++, shell, Mac, IP, Excite, log files.

But you're right -- it does make it hard to search for many of the most popular Microsoft products. The sad thing is that Microsoft most likely chooses generic names on purpose. They want to take advantage of (embrace and extend) existing language. I'm glad their "Digital Nervous System" term never caught on. It's bad enough that I have to deal with 3 possible meanings of IP (Internet Protocol, Information Protection, Intellectual Property).

Write AJAX apps in Qt-style GUI programming

[xynopsis]

I've read the previous comments that AJAX apps won't cut it because of its dependency on complicated Java and that programming complex UI logic in Javascript is a bad idea.

We've been working on a toolkit called Wt [sourceforge.net] that solves this problem among other issues when attempting to do AJAX. Best of all, it is pattterned on Qt and allows you to design webapps as you would in any desktop Qt application. The event mechanism is handled using signal and slots, allowing the same programming elegance found in Qt-based software. It allows you to focus on the design and logic of your program in one place and one place only! Quite similar to how Qt hides the details of the underlying window system from the programmer. Please check it out!