ComputerWorld:
AJAX-powered Web apps disappoint power users, Forrester says. “The local rendering of complex business screens requires serious client CPU time ...” Hmmm. I should think that time would be much shorter than making dozens of calls back to the server.
Comments:
I simply haven’t run into a ‘slow’ Ajax interface yet (I don’t use Yahoo for email). Perhaps, instead of weblogging, I should get out more ... (grin) ...
And just for the record I want to link to Adobe’s John Dowdell post about the very same Forrester report:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2008/03/anti-ajax_fud.cfm
I think in terms of serious business apps, the apt comparison is more likely Salesforce.com v. the SAP desktop client, and the latter doesn’t require multiple server roundtrips to load its UI.
My company’s app is very web 2.0; in the initial release the UI does result in slower performance than anyone is happy with but one of the benefits of this (SaaS) architecture is that we can roll out an update in a few weeks, with no user effort, that vastly improves things. In fact the developer mainly working on this showed us his initial build yesterday, so it really will roll out to our user base within a month.
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This is the problem I have with Yahoo Mail’s new AJAX-ey interface. It was simply far too slow in Camino on my aging Powermac G5. So I continue to use the old UI,w hich works perfectly well, without all the whizzy AJAX.
I like to look at AJAX the same way I look at Flash: unless you’ve got a really good reason (solves a thorny UI issue or makes the user experience better) to use the technology, then don’t.