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Ajax Bashing at JavaOne

 
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This past week at JavaOne in San Francisco was very interesting. If you did as I did and went by the topics listed in the Session Catalog, you would have seen that Ajax and Web 2.0 were amongst the hot topics. If you then went to most of the Ajax and Web 2.0 sessions, as I did, you would have been very dissappointed.

Why are so many other Java developers so very anti JavaScript? No, it is not type checked. So what? Many of these same people love Ruby! One session's presenters went so far as to claim that there were no debuggers for JavaScript (ever heard of Venkman?) and no IDE editors (there is at least on Eclipse JavaScript smart editor plugin).

Many presenters were also quite happy to show sample HTML and then happily display, even brag about, their near total ignorance of HTML.

My only logical conclusion from all of this is a massive case of ego and arrogance.

I have been a software developer for over 30 years. When I started a "debugger" was a person, not a program. Your editor was an IBM 029 keypunch machine. Your "advanced" language was FORTRAN IV.

None of our tools are perfect. JavaScript is not perfect. Java is not perfect (blasphemy!). And a web developer who feels he/she is "above" knowing HTML, CSS, XSLT, JavaScript and so on is neither a complete developer, nor a very good one.

Just my $0.02
 
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Some professionals may be very professional in their domain, but very unprofessional concerning things they don't understand, or things they don't even care to try seriously. The wrong people were presenting Ajax pretending they knew it all.
They'll always be pro-this, and anti-that. Pro-struts, anti-struts. Pro-Ajax, anti-Ajax... You've met the anti-ajax ones Don't bother about what they say. Try it yourself and evaluate how cool/bad it is.
 
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The problem with Developers that work on the server see JavaScript as a toy. Reason: They learned JavaScript the wrong way. I learned JavaScript the wrong way and I am sure almost everyone has. We looked online for an example, copied, pasted it, and had no clue what it was doing other than it worked.

Tell me the scope of a function and how it finds variables and such. Tell me what happens when you declare a variable locally that was defined globally. A lot of people that know JavaScript have no clue what happens in the background. Why does var x = "2" + "2"; and var y = "2" * "2"; handle numbers different?

If people would sit down and learn what JavaScript has to offer they would see it. But some people have their heads up their butts so far that they will not even try to learn something new.

Eric
 
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