Ajax, RIA and Web 2.0 Confusion
October 26th, 2008
Ajax, RIA and Web 2.0 Confusion
Published on October 26th, 2008 @ 08:15:05 pm , using 372 words, 3488 views
This is a quick post to notify all people out there that there seems to be a lot of people confused about the real meaning of the terms in the title. Let’s see:
Ajax is not a graphical technique. Surprised? Well, it never was. I see lots of Ajax frameworks out there providing graphical gadgets/components and people believe Ajax is just a way to mimic desktop look and feel in the browser.
Ajax was born to be a way of having asynchronous calls to the server, that is without the need of a page load for each new data fetch. That data was supposed to be done using XML (now Json is another option), and the call with HTTPRequest object. The data was helpful for lots of things, one of them loading combo boxes on the fly. Of course, the examples were done in UI to show the technique, and later on everybody was confused, thinking Ajax was just a way to make the UI experience richer.
Ah, and there we got Rich Internet Applications. These applications are real richer in user interactivity (think on Gmail). You can create those things using other tools, not necessarily Ajax techniques (yes, Ajax is not a tool nor a framework, but a technique). You can even (at an extreme) have RIA using Javascript and NO AJAX! A simple Flash site can be a RIA with no Ajax. And another Flash site may use Ajax (actionscript also counts) to make things richer.
Lastly, Web 2.0 is not Ajax, nor RIA! Web 2.0 is about people, the web working all the way around. Instead of the site owner posting and all the other mortals reading, web 2.0 says all the other may contribute to the site, create communities, build collective knowledge, be a part of the site! Now, to achieve this, sites can attract people using flashy pages, actual RIAs, and those may use Ajax to implement.
So, when someone says: “Here is the new tool for Web 2.0!” and you read later on it is a RIA tool, and later on that the tools allows to create rich pages using Ajax, you may note that someone does not know what is he talking about. 
William Martinez Pomares
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2 comments
Great job at trying to clarify these terms. Unfortunately I fear that they are intentionally vague. That way people can use them to mean what ever they want when ever they want to.
Our industry is mostly dominated by marketing not science. Science calls for precision. Marketing on the other hand calls for buzz.
I like your take on web 2.0. I think the term was coined by Tim O'reilly, yet I find your explanation more meaningful :)
Paul.
This is a very interesting topic. Some people may not know what they're talking about, but then again some others couldn't care less, cause they're making money...
Ajax can even be used without a browser, in an HTA using the asynchronous technique ONLY to retrieve data from the web. You can use this data as you wish, maybe you want to populate a local database or display a file in any format you like (text, pdf, whatever).
This is exactly what I do to help blind people using the Internet. By means of AJAX, data is gathered from the web, then it is formatted to text and finally displayed on Wordpad, for JAWS or a similar program to read it.
I think this is a clear example of what AJAX actually does.
On the other hand, as you have clearly stated, RIA and Web 2.0 refer mainly to rich interfaces without page reloading and a great degree of collaborative work respectively.
There are a lot of tools to evaluate design and accesibility issues. Is there any RIA or Web 2.0 evaluation tool? I think it's very difficult to automatically indicate how much of RIA or Web 2.0 a site has.
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