Wagnerblog

Someone recently pointed out to me that there are well over 100 different AJAX Frameworks floating around the Internet at the moment. Of course AJAX has been whole-heartedly adopted by the Web 2.0 crowd – rightly so I must say. Some of the folks from the “everything other than MS” camp are a bit chagrined when being reminded that the technology that AJAX was founded on – XMLHttpRequests – were a purely MS invention and have been around since 1999. OK, we won’t dwell on that.

AJAX applications are nice. In so many ways they seem to fit the bill of making a web application act more like a regular desktop app. For the uninitiated, Atlas is Microsoft’s approach to AJAX. And for once I really like what MS has done. Consequently I was excited to read Laurence Moroney’s treatment of the subject. Depending on the audience, this book can come across either as very useful or really boring. Personally I found it useful – mainly because I haven’t spent a lot of time with AJAX. So if you have had experience building AJAX based sites, this book is not for you. But if you are just getting into that area – or if you simply want to see a quick overview of Atlas, then this could be a good read.

Mr. Moroney starts by discussing a real life first hand example of an AJAX app saving the day after 9–11. Thats impressive. Equally impressive are the many good examples listed and the easy flowing style of his explanations. Everything builds very logically and Moroney covers all the essentials of Atlas. Some readers may want more details on certain pieces, but overall I think Moroney struck a good balance. He covers client-side and server side Atlas controls, deals with data binding and even web services as the data source (a seemingly ideal combination).

The bottom line is that this is a very good book for the right audience. And Atlas is the technology that I’m betting will outlast all of the other AJAX frameworks. Even the examples of this book clearly point the way that it wont be long for MS to produce IDE enhancements and tools that make the process of creating an AJAX based application very painless. I can’t wait.