this is the personal blog of brandon quintana.

For those not familiar with AJAX, there was an article I read when I first started learning by Jesse James Garrett called Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications. To sum the article, AJAX is XHTML/CSS for the presentation, display and interaction through the DOM model, data interchange using XML and XSLT through an XMLHttpRequest all bound together with JavaScript. For more information read the article. This week I came across an article called AJAX Gets ALE.

Satish Dharmaraj, co-founder and CEO of open source software Zimbra, states that ALE (AJAX Linking and Embedding) is equivalent to Microsoft’s OLE. The example they use is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet inside a Microsoft Word Document.

Bringing this concept to AJAX could be good or bad. I see a lot of security concerns for people that don’t take that into consideration. In my AJAX work I try to keep things simple and for the most part I do mostly reading from the database and a little writing. In any case, AJAX doesn’t directly write to my databases.

On the other hand, if this technology is used correctly I see a great potential and step forward in AJAX. It would bring Web 2.0 applications closer to desktop application usability. This would further push things away from specific platforms and into any platform that can run a modern web browser.

I look forward to seeming more on this topic but I think I’m going to have to wait and see what happens before I use any of it in my projects.