Yes, Fr-Ajax [fr-ey-j-a-x]. Frame-based-Asynchronous JavaScript. It’s here to stay. Well, not really, it was here to stay in 1999, on a project I worked on, but got scrapped - probably because it was too cool - before it ever launched, and in my never-ending quest to become Master of All Media and Inventor of the Universe, I feel gypped.

Let me back up a bit. I am totally behind on the Ajax wave. I just finished playing with a couple of demos on my local box. And it’s exactly what it’s supposed to be: easy, fast, seamless, a great interface helper. For me this is liberating: remote connectivity and activity is seamless, back-grounded, and independent of the current URL state, and user interaction is freed from the typical HTTP-Request -(Wait)- Response-and-Load format — I’m ecstatic, as I can now control one more facet of a visitor’s experience to my site.

It prompted a few thoughts for me though: it’s just a matter of time before the experience is elevated to the better Flash experiences. What does this do to Flash? Will it slowly be abandoned for the non-proprietary technology? Isn’t this DHTML? And most importantly, shouldn’t my 1999 team & I get credit for inventing it? Ok, so we didn’t use XMLHttpRequest, and cross-browser JavaScript support was a joke (we developed in Netscape 4.x, then, contrary to best practices moved to the more unpredictable but, as it turned out, stable MSIE 4), and we were using a dozen or so hidden frames to send and return data requests on demand, but it was the same idea, right? Anyway, I’m hooked now, AJAX is great, and my decade-old struggle to elevate DHTML as an attractive and easy-to-use interface up and over the top of the web-gui heap has been re-ignited.

Down with misused, abused, bandwidth-hogging, proprietary plugins! Up with DHTML!

Lucas Monaco, Associate Director of Technology

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