Tuesday March 15, 2005

Ajax is good for Sun

In Monday's Wall Street Journal Lee Gomes had an column about AJAX. AJAX is the name for an overall approach for developing fast and powerful web based programs. Tim Bray also referred to Ajax in his perspective on Sun written on his first anniversary at Sun. I have to say that Mr. Gomes did an amazing job of explaining something complicated and making it simple. I am always in awe of people who make writing look easy. It is just too bad it costs significant dollars to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal online to read the article.

I disagree with Mr. Gomes on his analysis of how Ajax impacts Sun. Towards the end of the article he says "Who loses? For one, Sun Microsystems, which has for years talked up its Java programming language for precisely these sorts of jobs. Instead of Java Ajax-style programming uses JavaScript – no relation – which is easier to work with and built free into every browser."

Sun builds and sells computers, especially servers. As Tim says in his essay Sun does it very well. The more that what people want from their computers moves off people's desktops and on to the internet, the better off Sun is. To serve up content and programs from the internet requires servers. It requires lots of fast, powerful servers. That is exactly what Sun builds and sells. The more this web centric model becomes reality and the more people come to the conclusion that they don't need to own or administer a computer to do everything they need to do, the better the Sun Ray stateless client will sell and the better Sun will do.

When I started reading Gomes' article I thought to myself how great AJAX is for Sun and I still think so.