Liquid, Solid and Gaseous Ajax
There’s an interesting little piece on today’s TheServerSide.com, by Vitaliy Shevchuk. He suggests that the term ‘Ajax’ is covering many, many different approaches, and mushing them up into a single concept. Defining the sub-types as liquid, gaseous and solid is a nice touch.
There’s a lot of noise in the discussion, but the original distinction is a good one:
- pure javascript client, with maximal decoupling from the server tier
- generated javascript, from a server-tier component model
- incremental ajaxification through refreshing sub-pages
Interestingly, he doesn’t say which is which, in terms of the solid/liquid/gas analogy :-)