Dare Obasanjo writes:
Most people who’ve done significant AJAX development will admit that the development story is a mess. I personally don’t mind the the Javascript language but I’m appalled that the most state of the art development process I’ve found is to use Emacs to edit my code, Firebug to debug in Firefox and attaching Visual Studio to the Internet Explorer processes to debug in IE. This seems like a joke when compared to developing Java apps in Eclipse or .NET applications in Visual Studio. Given how hypercompetitive the “Web 2.0” world is, I doubt that this state of affairs will last much longer. There is too much pressure on Web companies to improve their productivity and stand out in a world full of derivative YouTube/MySpace/Flickr knock offs. If one company finds a way to be more productive and/or build richer Web applications the rest of the industry will follow. This is pretty much what happened with Google and AJAX as well as with YouTube and Flash Video. Once those companies showed how much value they were getting from technologies which were once passe, everyone jumped on the bandwagon. This means that it is inevitable that Rich Internet Applications will eventually be built on a platform that provides a better development experience than AJAX does today. The only questions are how quickly will this happen and which technology will replace AJAX?
Ted Leung mentions two contenders for the throne; Flash/Flex and OpenLaszlo. I’ll add a third entry to that list, Windows Presention Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E).
