I just realized today that if I don’t explicitly promote the new components at work to my colleagues these new components will NEVER be used. Well actually it’s like this for a while now everybody at work started to see the advantages brought by AJAX and they started using it in various forms for delegating information and making the static content more “dynamic”. Of course everybody started implementing their own AJAX library … well more or less, most of the cases it’s the same JavaScript code that you find on the first link when you search on Google for “XMLHttpRequest”, and actually it’s not really a library more of a function customized for everyone’s needs. Also many of these implementations don’t even check to see whether the operation ended successfully because many of them don’t even send data back returning the status of the custom operation.
It was the same case even on my project which had a custom AJAX implementation though a very complicated mechanism which involved too many steps. To be honest I didn’t even bother to try to understand what was going on there but after some benchmarking tests I decided that we should re-write the whole Data-to-AJAX-to-Data problem, so this way we came up with something similar to a web service which has several levels of customization (serialization, content-type, security) and MOST important it sets a standard for working with AJAX and also it clearly separates the presentation layer from the domain logic. Also together with the JavaScript guy we wrote a class for the client-side which has error management and it also implements a customization level trough delegates. All being said and done we set a standard in our application for us for an easy implementation but I was surprised to find that most of the programmers don’t care about this … they still use the old crappy methods of getting the data and justify by saying that it takes too much to implement these new service model, and now I try a question: “Does it really take more time to implement this model, more than patching the current implementations?”, there were also people interested in this people for which I explicitly created a small example so this way I managed to get some feedback and even some implementation requests.
And probably the conclusion is that inside a company it’s probably necessary once a while to promote your work, even more when the company has many projects on the role that use the same technology. But the implementation for these components still remains an issue. So how to deal with these problems?
On a more personal thing but the title applies perfectly in this case, yesterday evening I went to a book-signing followed by a concert, well the concert was quite nice actually (I also know some guys from the band) but when the author started reading from the book I realized he’s a complete idiot and I was absolutely sure that I would NEVER buy the book.
Peace out
