AJAX, OSGi Hot Topics At EclipseCon

A number of vendors have released AJAX toolsets to ease development, but the profusion of toolsets is becoming an issue in and of itself. The Eclipse Foundation's AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) aims to provide foundational unification. Panelist Robert Goodman classified it as an "incubation phase" project.

"We're still trying to figure out exactly what we want to produce," Goodman said.

One particular AJAX toolkit, the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), won praise from panelist Eric Clayberg, senior vice president of product development for developer tools ISV Instantiations. Google, an AJAX pioneer, open-sourced its toolkit in December. Instantiations quickly adopted it.

"We looked around and were quite dismayed by the number of different AJAX frameworks. When Google came out with theirs, we were quite impressed by it," Clayberg said. "We're thinking this is something the industry can consolidate around. At least in our case, seeing a big brand name like Google gives [GWT] some legs in the market."

While the AJAX discussion drew a big audience, some developers remain unconvinced that AJAX is the future of Web development. One audience member, RadRails developer Kyle Shank, took advantage of a question-and-answer session to criticize AJAX mania.

Shank recently spent several months working on a "large project for a large company you'd know" re-implementing a rich-client interface on the Web using Dojo's AJAX toolkit. He categorized the effort as a total, painful disaster. The development was klugy and hard to scale, he said.

AJAX is a powerful tool in the hands of expert programmers, but too many are trying to use it to solve problems better tackled with other technologies, he said. JavaScript, a technology that fell into disgrace among Web developers in the '90s before enjoying an AJAX-fueled renaissance, remains a substandard language, Shank argued.

Nonetheless, the EclipseCon session's participants foresee a healthy future for AJAX -- one they'd like to see Eclipse play a pivital role in facilitating.

"Once AJAX gets a rich set of tooling, I think people will really start to get the benefits of it," Instantiations' Clayberg said.