In this blog entry from Ed Burnette, he voices some opinions about what he calls “Ajax anti-patternsâ€Â, things that Ajax sites need to watch out for as they’re developing their sites.
Microsoft recently rolled out live.com, a beta Ajax home page, to mixed reviews. The interesting part to me in all this are the lessons that can be learned, not just for improving live.com, but for all Ajax enabled applications. In a candid article, team member Scott Isaacs dissects the problems they have identified so far. I’ll summarize the basic points here. Consider these Ajax anti-patterns, though you’ll find they are equally applicable to Java, .NET, and other runtime environments.
The five issues he lists are:
- Chatty communication – lots of “chatter†back and forth between the server
- Too much XML parsing – libraries to parse XML in the browser are still relatively slow
- Loading everything before displaying something – don’t make the user wait if things are slow. give them something.
- Rendering on the server – make good decisions as to where to render various page content
- Over thinking the design – don’t use the old mentality of just a few releases, update often and in bits