Almost Advanced Ajax

John R. Dance

Advanced Ajax: Architecture and Best Practices by Shawn M. Lauriat, Prentice Hall, 2008, ISBN: 978-0-13-135064-9, 360 pp.

The techniques that embody Ajax have quickly swept the Web. Quick adoption of any new technology means mistakes happen and the technology is put to inappropriate uses. It’s no different with Ajax. Advanced Ajax attempts to help instill good design and practice behind the technology. It contains several good patterns and practices, but it’s missing some key aspects of an advanced book.

Among many good patterns, for instance, Shawn M. Lauriat describes the uses of MVC (model-view-controller) on both the client and server sides. He also provides good examples of abstraction and event handling to keep your code maintainable. The chapters on scalability, maintainability, and security are good. He brings up several security issues that I need to learn more about.

In addition to patterns and design considerations, Advanced Ajax also covers much of the application life cycle. Lauriat surveys tools to assist in debugging, profiling, and documenting your code. A final chapter describes an online game that’s interesting and provides good motivations to many topics covered in the other chapters of the book.

However, a book with “Advanced” in the title should serve as a reference long after reading. Advanced Ajax can’t do this. Although the index is good, the material is poorly organized, which makes the table of contents nearly useless. For example, there’s a good pattern involving the use of cascading stylesheets, but it’s buried in a section called “General Practices, Processor Usage.” The documentation chapter includes a section called “Mind That Bus.” It’s a clever title that’s explained in the text, but it doesn’t help when searching for material after the first read. Often I felt as though I was looking through a filing cabinet that filed my blue Honda records under “Blue” rather than under “Auto” or “Honda.”

Advanced Ajax has many code examples, but rather than helpful, some seemed long and laborious. I often felt the author was jumping into source code without motivations into why it was important or what to look for. With the proper introduction, example source can be thought provoking and provide good material for future reference. An example problem presented first, then solved in the source code helps readers try to think ahead of the author or look for the solution themselves, as they read the source code. Not so here.

On more than one occasion, I found myself turning the page to get to the conclusion or final key point so that I could put the discussion to practice in my work. I would turn the page and find that the discussion had ended. I often wished for a list of salient key points to conclude a chapter or section.

I also expected to find an introduction of many of the JavaScript client libraries that are available. Only two sentences even acknowledge that they exist. The book has an accompanying Web site that sounded promising, but it appears to be a work in progress. Currently, it has only 11 code examples.

Advanced Ajax starts with a goal of covering “the range of topics necessary to create a well-rounded application, regardless of the tools and technologies used.” It does cover a broad range of topics, but it misses out on becoming an advanced reference in my library.

John R. Dance is a principal architect at UIEvolution. You can contact him at jdance@uievolution.com.