Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Mercury: AJAX has its drawbacks

April 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Mercury: AJAX has its drawbacks

TAGS: Application Development

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) may be all the rage as a scripting technology for Web applications, but it is not without its drawbacks, according to an executive at Mercury Interactive.

"AJAX is incredible where people are starting to adopt it and it immediately causes a lot of problems because it's not very structured," said Rajesh Radhakrishnan, vice president of Application Delivery at Mercury. Several Mercury executives met with InfoWorld editors at Mercury offices in Mountain View, Calif. on Tuesday morning.

"We've seen tons and tons of problems," with AJAX, Radhakrishnan said. In testing for functionality and regression, Mercury has seen an increased number of regressions in AJAX, said Radhakrishnan.

As a workaround, Radhakrishnan suggests using AJAX for the cutting edge part of UI development, to enable interactions between the client and server in which the server is able to respond to client requests later. "For the rest of it, you don't really use AJAX,""Radhakrishnan said.

"So far in general, when we've gone into AJAX shops, it's been a ton of pain," he said. Security, however, has not been much of a problem with AJAX, said Radhakrishnan.

Also during the session, Radhakrishnan noted the uptake in agile programming. "We're seeing customers asking us for templates for agile and extreme [programming] and we are absolutely providing that to them," Radhakrishnan said.

One Mercury executive said developers in general are not fond of application testing, but SOA is requiring it. "The truism is developers don't want to test," said Jonathan Rende, vice president of product marketing in the Application Delivery group at Mercury.

"The thing with SOA is they're being forced to because the service is going to be reused. We are investing in that area," Rende said.

Meanwhile, Mercury is not losing sleep over the possibility of open source projects encroaching on its domain. What is done in Eclipse and open source really does not affect Mercury's business, said Christopher Lochhead, Mercury's chief marketing officer.

Mercury is much more about validating business functionality; freeware and open source software for developer testing do not impact Mercury much, Lochhead said.

Posted by Paul Krill on April 18, 2006 04:14 PM

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