Oi vai, Coach Wei!

John Dowdell has a pretty good post in response to NexaWeb's CTO article on Sys-con. I agree with most everything JD had to say, but thought I'd throw my $0.02 as well.

1. I personally hate when people start throwing around labels like "open-standards", "standards-compliant" card without any supporting substance. First off, there are de jure and de facto standards. If something came out of W3C, Oasis or any other standards body that's your de jure. If millions of people adopted a technology or if ~95% of computers in the world run a non-W3C approved technology, that's a de facto (read Flash plugin here).

2. I checked NexaWeb's examples on their site to see how "standards-compliant" they are, and guess what: with the Java plugin disabled, here's the message I get for all but one of their examples (the one that works is a simple Google Maps-based app):

You don't have JAVA plugin enabled or installed, click here for more info.

With that in mind, does the following conclusion in Coach's article hold any water??:

"Ajax is open, standard-based and web-native. Flash is not open standards-based. Flash content is not native web content and has a lot of interoperability issues with other web technologies"

If you do not mind me asking, does Java Applet programming constitute as Ajax development? Isn't NexaWeb using a plugin which is a lot more closed-source than the Flash plugin? How "web native" is Java applet-based content?

3. I am sick and tired to hear those baseless attacks on Flash and even more meaningless comparisons between Flash and Ajax ( I really should say Flex and Ajax). I'd like to see Adobe taking a firmer position on this subject. I think the policy of trying to satisfy everyone's interests will not produce the desired results. Flex is NOT a technology complementary to Ajax. It kicks Ajax's butt. The technologies are beyond any comparison. If you care to compare, you might as well write an analysis on how space shuttle technologically differs from Model-T.

I have done a number of Ajax-based projects and the experience of tweaking JavaScript to make it work the same in all browsers is nauseating to say the least. Parsing or composing XML using JavaScript is completely retarded. Come on, it is 21st century and you're coding XML by hand?? using JavaScript?? I'd rather get paid doing something more enjoyable (like creating WebORB-based apps, he he he :) )