<email_from_my_dad>

Yo WTF is AJAX?

Your Ol'Fart Dad.

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This is what happens when your dad reads your blog that is more on the technical end of things (I do however enjoy making fun of him so his email was posted).

So I made a bad assumption that everyone knows what Ajax is.  Ajax is both household cleaner and a way to make asynchronous calls to a web server without causing your webpage to post back to your server.  Jesse James Garrett has an awesome diagram showing this concept.  It also instantly makes anything you do look really awesome and neat.

So why isn't everything Ajax'ed if it is so eff'in neat?  Cause it is a pain to create, the site still needs a backup if the browser can't support it, and the developer coding needs to know JavaScript (which seems to be way harder to find than I thought).

For the past few days I've been creating a PowerPoint deck on ASP.Net Ajax and seeing how it would make my life easier if I were to use that instead of one of the 50 other frameworks or just by hand.  Now, one should know, I've been doing the "by hand" way for a year now and have grown to like it since it has some raw power.

My opinion shifted however when I did a line count on a pretty simple task.  And that task didn't even include failure code!  Basically with the .Net way of doing Ajax, I had to write 1 line of code.  1 line.  No need to parse the XML properly or if I'm transversing the DOM tree properly.  It just works.

Now I haven't pushed the boundaries of ASP.Net Ajax to where some of the stuff I've done in the past, but with the toolkit they have on CodePlex, I'm fairly sure I have nothing to worry about.  MS provides some feature rich controls with their source code so people can see how to build some truly great web sites.

For my deck, I was going to do some Ajax with some hardware devices (my relay boards and ambient orb) but without a good webcam to show this example over the Internet for this presentation, it is semi pointless.  When I have more time, I'll work this demo into the presentation.  I'll end up posting this presentation too I believe on BTE so then my ol' fart dad can become educated on the wonders of Web 2.0.