Ajax Design Patterns

Chapter 3. Ajax Design: Principles and Patterns

AJAX DOES A LOT FOR WEB USABILITY, HAS ALREADY DELIVERED SOME STUNNING APPLICATIONS, AND IS clearly the “in” thing at this time. But it’s no magic bullet. Careful design is always required, and it must be tailored to the technology at hand. By monitoring the state of Ajax applications, we continue to learn about what works and what doesn’t, and about how developers are succeeding in their design trade-offs. This chapter explains these lessons at a high level and introduces the patterns, which discuss them in depth.

Desirable Attributes of Ajax Applications

Ajax is about improving user experience and delivering value to the organizations that own and use web applications. Here, we’ll look at the key attributes of an ideal Ajax application. Reality dictates that you’ll never get the best of all worlds, so you’ll have to make trade-offs based on how important you consider each attribute. The Ajax Patterns are intended to help you deal with these trade-offs.

Usability

Ajax applications should be as intuitive, productive, and fun to use as possible.

Developer productivity

Development should be as efficient as possible, with a clean, maintainable code base.

Efficiency

Ajax applications should consume minimal bandwidth and server resources.

Reliability

Ajax applications should provide accurate information and preserve the integrity of data.

Privacy

While user-generated data can and should be used to improve the user experience, users’ privacy should ...