Laith Zraikat

The hype is still on. "A.J.A.X." Frameworks are being developed to help programmers develop web applications that do not refresh. There's a lot of talk about doing it, but not enough about why it needs to be done. Do we really want to develop such applications on such a wide scale? Are users actually requesting that?

I personally refuse to believe that users dislike the page refresh nature of the internet and are more interested in seeing applications that don’t refresh between requests.

I believe Internet users care more about innovative applications, page loading speed, ease of use, and an error free experience. Whether the page refreshes after clicking a button or not becomes trivial if the application sucks, or if it takes too long to send back a request, or even worse, if you get an error. One could also argue that Internet users are now so used to seeing the page refresh that it doesn’t bother as many of them as it used to.

As a developer I do advocate the use of asynchronous callbacks (or Remote Scripting) when it is absolutely "needed" in "some" parts of your application, and when it improves the user experience without adding unnecessary confusion for the user or the developer.

Due to the disconnected nature web applications, complexities will arise for developers when this problem is amplified in an environment using remote scripting for the following reasons:

• You can’t easily debug JavaScript. Take it from me, it is a nightmare to develop.
• You can't log errors that occur on the user side without writing separate routines to send back error details to your server "asynchronously".
• Special routines have to be written to enable the application to break down gracefully in case of an error without scaring the user while still informing her of the error.
• Different browser standards for implementing remote scripting.

Finally, take Microsoft for example, they did not use remote scripting in their MSN Web Messenger. It could have used less refreshes, but I guess MS are aware of the complexities involved, and they wanted to keep their application as error free and as compatible with all browsers as possible.