WWJUA - Where Would Jesus Use Ajax?

There’s a good discussion going on over at Ajaxian about specific times when Ajax should or should not be used based on a posting by Alex Bosworth (10 Places You Must Use Ajax).

From Alex’s article:

For heavy use applications such as a webmail client or a blogreader, users have the luxury of time to learn new UI concepts, and the frustration of interacting with a slow interface. This kind of application is a perfect opportunity to leverage Ajax everywhere. The more frequently users use an application, the more Ajax should be powering that use.

However for most web applications, it doesn’t make any sense to use Javascript for everything or even anything. Ajax only really clearly helps in a limited set of circumstances; the web already worked pretty well before Ajax and there are a lot of pitfalls and drawbacks to using Ajax in web development. A straight html weblog works just fine without being generated dynamically on the client with a stream of asynchronous messages from the server. Plain old HTML also works great for documents, or navigating between documents. Simple or rarely used applications can get along fine without putting in a bunch of Javascript.

A good reminder for sure, that ultimately it is not the technology that should dictate developer choices, rather it should be whatever will best serve the customer (the users!)

Good discussion going on Ajaxian: 6 Places You Must Use Ajax