Ah, the price of being a buzzword. It turns out that ajaxWrite, Michael Robertson’s latest venture, doesn’t even use Ajax. Or at least, the ajax that was defined by Jesse James Garrett way back when. It’s built primarily on XUL, a cilent-side scriptiong and GUI langauge for the Mozilla platform.
Anyway, it’s all just a heap of marketing spin I suppose. But then again, the spirt of these types of apps is to undermine the classic installable applications like Microsoft Office. You’re not going to do that by building it on a language that is only supported by Mozilla/Firefox, which is only run by 7% of your typical users.
Technologies aside, it isn’t a very good implementation of a web-based word processor. We’ll see what they put out on Wednesday.
I took one look at it and knew it was XUL and not Ajax. Oh the hype. XUL is a lot more powerful anyway, and I HAVE NO IDEA why more developers don’t leverage the technology for creating rich apps.
Have a look at George Nava’s excellent XUL example applications.
True, the Mozilla application framework isn’t cross-browser, but it is cross-platform, runs over the wire, and provides real interface widgets. Ajax is cool for some things, abused for others, and generally way, way over-hyped.
XUL’s pretty neat, but Rich answered in his post WHY developers don’t use it; low adoption by users. Why it’s fun to play with in your spare time, getting paid for a living to do is few and far between.
buy strong Coca tea at ie-seven.com
It’s the egg cream of software.
There is no AJAX, only XUL!
Rich at Basement.org enlightens us to the fact that Michael Robertson’s hyped ajaxWrite, in fact contains no Ajax, but is infact written in XUL, hence the reason its only supported in Mozilla/Firefox. Doh!Basement.org: AjaxWrite Doesn’t Use Ajax(?)T
February 18, 2005 is way back when now? Man this web 1.1 is moving faster and faster. Pretty soon yesterday will be ancient history ;)
Strangly, I have a hankering for some strong coca tea…if I only knew where to get some…
I just talked about this at http://techslavior.blogspot.com/2006/03/ajax-for-ajaxs-sake.html – ajaxWrite has completely missed the point of Ajax and web applications.
Sorry, got the wrong address: http://slavior.blogspot.com/2006/03/ajax-for-ajaxs-sake.html
Yet, just 7%. But with XUL Runner it could be a nice stand-alone application… with time