That’s the question I think of over and over again… People are speaking of Ajax and all that stuff, but no one speaks ever of the daily problems coming with it. My worst enemy for this topic is the proxy, sometimes also called firewall, or especially sys-admins restricting software. What ever it’s called, the main problem is that both are standing between you and the world wide web and that the most companies are using a system like that.

And here we are… What if some kind of fanatic security “profession” excludes the Active.X or the xhtml request component on your workstation? Now you might probably say “for what?”… Security risk maybe? I’m no sys-administrator so I don’t know why. But in fact, many companies, mostly the big ones, are restricting anything a user could possibly do with his workstation. Disabling any kind of software installation or deactivating anything a browser could do, for example. In fact deactivating software installations is useful! I mean, think of your secretary installing a program “Stan Long” send her via email with the subject “enlarge your xxx”. But why restricting the browser? Because of some spy ware coming along with something you downloaded or watched? But why not use a browser that isn’t as sensitive as the IE? Many questions, many answers.

Unfortunately many companies are using the Internet Explorer as default browser. The only browser, I know, that allows to disable all functions you can imagine. Maybe because it’s coming along with windows and can be installed and maintained remotely. The problem I found and that what makes me start thinking about it is, what if whole companies are not able to see or use your web-application/websites? It’s not like they’re just deactivating the whole javascript thing. That would be very bad at all. They only lock the xhtml request method or the Active.X ability. And boom, no Ajax call possible anymore. Now you’ve got some alternatives… First one is to go demonstrate against all bureaucrats that are restricting browser configurations. And the other one, the more intelligent one, is to do some double programming work and build a fully working non-ajax application that is used if no Ajax is available. Sound like work.. and that extra work sounds like money no one wants to pay on top. Especially the motivation is very low on programming something twice. In my case it is! So mainly you’ve got to decide against or for company business users. Deciding against business users is not a possibility in my daily business, so far. In fact that these users are surfing up to eight/ten hours a day from their workplace.

So the one question at the end is: “is this the right time to spread Ajax driven applications for end users?”. It’s surely a really fantastic possibility to make you web-apps more dynamic and more usable. I also love to write applications using the whole javascript and Ajax stuff. But what if the whole world is not ready for this technology? Maybe the few lucky Firefox, Opera, Safari and (unrestricted) Internet Explorer users are. There are some ways to solve this problem.

1. No one ever restricts any browser config anymore.
2. We all use a good kind of browser and live happily ever after…
3. Somebody pays the double work.
4. We all start to ignore the problem and build web-applications like we do now.
5. Running around crying and screaming: “why? oh, why?”

I’d prefer point 2 or 3… But I swear, if I find any solution that doesn’t sound creepy, I’ll write it done here for sure…