AJAX and the whole 2.0 stuff

Some are all buzzed about it, some others are angry that someone has even thought about naming a fashion Web 2.0. Like their was a version for the “Web”. It’s like naming your own child “Version 1.2” (I know some guy did… That’s not my point). I’m not angry at this, I think it’s a marketing stuff, “hey come with us we got the next version of the internet wright now!”, hum… Pretty tempting. But all that matters to us programmers (and users) is if it will make our live easier.
Today I get to try Yahoo Mail boosted on Ajax. You can drag and drop stuff all around, and you even get a popup menu to tickle you mail. But man! It’s slow! I thought that AJAX was all about asynchronous processing to make web pages more fast. Now I have to wait 5 full seconds to even check if I got mail. I switched back to my old and comforting yahoo mail without all the glamour stuff, but the efficiency.

At the same time I’m building a web app and using AJAX to boost up my … ego. But on the functional side, It’s great, having to interact remotely with the server without posting or without not-so-cool spaghetti javascript packed with collections loaded at post time… hurrrrr… You know when you got a child collection to be modified on a web page without reloading, that’s the kind of stuff that makes your life easier and your code cleaner.

All my work has been done with Castle, MonoRail and ActiveRecord are like Ruby on Rails, but it’s the MicroKernel Container of Ioc that makes it super powerful. You can hack services (full of dependencies if you wish or have to), test them with mocks and them plug it in the container. Then you only add the interface to your service in the Controller’s constructor like this:

public ServiceController(IMyCoolService service)
{
  _service = service;
}