Forrester Research is predicting a shake-up in the
market for rich internet application development tools as Ajax
battles with Adobe’s rival Flex toolset.
The analyst company said the explosion of proprietary Ajax
frameworks is threatening to overwhelm the benefits of openness,
standard languages and performance that Ajax offers. At the same
time, Forrester said Adobe has been working to integrate its own
technology into the open source Firefox web browser.
Forrester warned that there were dozens of popular Ajax
frameworks, which meant that software architects needed to validate
that the framework they planned to use supported corporate
standards for security, accessibility, service integration, and
data access.
Another drawback Forrester saw was that most developers in
enterprise IT prefer visual designers and visual editing tools. But
when programming Ajax, the only such tools support available at
present are tied to commercial Ajax frameworks, rather than open
source tools.
Forrester senior analyst Jeffrey Hammond said in a recent paper,
“Choosing a commercial Ajax solution means adopting a proprietary
framework and development tools. In this light, commercial Ajax
providers look more like Adobe than like open source Ajax tool
kits.”
He expected Adobe to turn up the heat by improving its open
source strategy. Adobe will squeeze commercial Ajax providers even
more by improving support for integrating custom controls into Flex
and by pushing Active Script, the scripting language used in Adobe
Flash 9, into the Tamarin project run by Mozilla.
Forrester said the number of open source and commercial Ajax
tools available to developers was unsustainable. It expected users
to delay substantial investment decisions until the market shakes
out. Open source tool kits such as Dojo, GWT, and Openlaszlo will
benefit because the opportunity cost of using them is low,
Forrester said.
Forrester also warned that Ajax developers needed to spend extra
time testing due to web browser incompatibility issues. Testing
costs increase in direct proportion to the number of browser
platforms and versions to be supported, the analyst firm said.
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX
Comment on this article:
computer.weekly@rbi.co.uk