Yahoo UI Ex - What Ajax really Needs.

When talking about Ajax, I'm a MS shop guy. MS ajax definitely eased up lots of things that otherwise would take a long time to develop or otherwise difficult. However, having said that, like I always said, Ajax without UI Components, there is only so much you can do.

MS Ajax Toolkit is a good idea and they sure have quite a few "widgets" for you to build your website. The problem is? They are mostly useless! I'm not impressed by most (not all) of their toolkit components. It feels like they are a bunch of normal javascript components wrapped around a few .NET Controls. Some of them you can totally get around by using JavaScriptonly. What we really need is UI components developed by Jack Slocum. 

Take a look at following GUI widgets available for you develop your next Ajax applications (and they are just part of what Jack has to offer :) )

1. An Ajax Search That turns up search result with paging! Useful!



2. Post your comment is this window and view the comments in a separate  tab!




3. Want to add a new tab? Here it is!




4. Want to have a grid that's resizeable, draggable and sortable? Look no further! (if you are like me, being searching for a grid that has these three features, you KNOW it's nearly impossible. ActiveWidget is nice, but well, they are not as nice as Jack, they want $$$)





These components are in Alpha 3 right now because Jack is integrating JQuery and Scriptaculous into his framework in addition to Yahoo UI. I really think there should be more Ajax GUI developers like Jack out there. I personally believe these development will push Ajax to the next level!

Before I comment further, I'd like to say what distinguished these gui away from the traditional dhtml widgets is the fact that they are friendly to server side data. YAHOO UI ext handles server side xml really well. Take a look at how it does it. Without this ability, Ajax is nothing but a word to make themselves sound cool.

I used to use AjaxPro and only given up on it because AjaxPro is an "Ajax Data Access" framework, after getting back the data, you had to bang your head on the wall trying to come up with a good solution to DISPLAY and render them on the page! MS Ajax on the other hand allows "Ajax behaviors" when wrapped their updatepanel around your server side components like GridView, Repeater and what not, which seemed to solve the issue of both "data access" and "rendering gui" in this aspect. (btw, I think some of the controls integrates with .net profile services which is definilty cool, that's one thing I like very much)

In the earlier days (which is just a little less than a year ago), without these Yahoo UI Ex components, the only way to simulate the "ajaxy" behavior is to make your server side components look like it's not refreshing the page, but the issue that I quickly found out there is only so much you can do. The GUI doesn't behave as smooth and the user experience is well limited within the area of what the server side GUI has to offer.

Well, no more. If Yahoo UI Ext continue to develop these excellent GUI components used for rendering sever-side data, I might go back to AjaxPro now. No need for the server to install anything like MS Ajax and I can rest assure that my customers will be able to run my application without the need to install anything on their side. Although, I'm still considering using MS Ajax for data access purposely only as it auto return my server side data in JSON format, I'm just waiting for the moment when most of my customers have it installed on their server. (Also, I'm waiting for Ajax Control ToolKit to come up with some good GUI widgets, at the minute, I'm told tab is here already, Ajax Grid is a high demand item on their issue tracker, if it's a catch up game, then I'm looking forward to the date when MS catch up with others and possibily more!)

One last thing I want to mention is that we should appreicate and thank people like Jack who devote their time for the benefits of the community. They are the true heros who pushed us further.

Very excited and I'm looking forward to upgrade my product to use these components in the soon future.

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