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This AJAX thing 25 Mar 2006

This ajaxwrite.com thing has gone mainstream this week and everyone’s excited. The coder in me thinks it is pretty damn nifty: doing all that in the browser is very clever. But the technologist in me… well, that character is just thinking “What on earth are you doing? Emulating MS Word? In a browser? That’s just f*cked-up! :o)

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  1. But without a non-local document store what's the point? The whole point of the web-as-application interface (GMail, Flickr, etc) is that the experience is the same if I'm at my desktop at work, my laptop at home or even your Mac at chez Poole… So I'm tied to the machine that hosts my documents, why not just install OpenOffice? It seems like an application that exists more because it's 'cool' that because it scratches a genuine itch.James Spinks#
  2. Spot on chief: it seems to be an example of “Why? Because we can.”Ben Poole#
  3. Your link to ajaxwrite is missing a 't'.
    Thanks,
    --MacMac Guidera#
  4. Thanks Mac: your comment came through at the same time three different people mailed me about it! How peculiar :-) Ben Poole#
  5. I can think of a couple of reasons for using an app like this. 1) No licensing. 2) No hard-drive space requirements aside from what you need for your documents. 3) No software to crash your machine or interfere with other applications. OK, that was more than a couple. And yes, as you pointed out there are downsides - you're tied to a single machine, and if their server is down you're stuck. Esther Strom#
  6. Good proof of concept though. I like writely better - which addresses @1.

    The world needs these concepts to show what is possible. MS are milking their dated licensing model for all its worth now. This type of development helps to convince the world there is more to life than MS!

    Simon Barratt#
  7. No disputing it’s clever I just don’t quite get the brouhaha around it. Is hard drive space really an issue in this day and age? Re licensing, agreed, who wants to be milked by MS, but there are plenty of alternatives to Word nowadays (some free).Ben Poole#

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I’m a developer / general IT wrangler, specialising in web apps, the mobile web, enterprise Java and the odd Domino system.

Best described as a simpleton, but kindly. Read more…