In the last few days I started to explore start.com and live.com, the two quite new WEB 2.0 sites of Microsoft. As usual Microsoft is not the first, but tries to get the most out of new ideas, in this case the WEB 2.0 movement (unification of desktop and the web). Of course there are some earlier developments (YAHOO gadgets, google desktop). But my impression is that Microsoft wants to get the highest degree of integration of the into their operating system (Windows Vista).

After having some success developing my first small sample gadgets I got the irresistible feeling that again security issues a the big point against live.com. Don’t missunderstnd myself, I like the great variety of possibilities, the richness of the bindings an the simple integration into the well known and (in)famous world of DHTML, but let’s see:

One of the first thing you have to do if ou want to develop something is to weaken the client side security levels for connection to live.com and start.com (see for example the explanations on the developer pages for start.com). Both must be added as trusted sites in the configurations for the IE6 and even worse the unsaint Access data sources across domains feature should be enabled. I wait for the first gadget attacks using this security flaw !!

Am I to pessimistic? I hope so, because I would enjoy to support WEB 2.0 and I am sure Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are the key player in this new game. But please don’t make the same mistakes as in the first DHTML era….

Just for fun I played a little bit with AJAX, an finally I got a first result. My homepage with AJAX !
Try It!

There is nothing special with it. The only task for AJAX currently is to exchange the main texts of my homepage. The main text is contained in a DIV region with ID=’ajaxContainer’ (what a surprise). And the only thing AJAX does, is to get the new content of this container every time it is requested by the standard links ! That’s it. And try it!

The AJAX page is quite overfeatured, because there is a lot of other DHTML stuff used for the AJAX configuration and logging sub window. I forgot to mention it. This window is used to have some feeling and control on AJAX. It allows to delay, to animate and to log the AJAX functionality. Have a look at it and try it. I’ll discuss it later.

My first experiences with AJAX showed me that it is not as simple, the AJAX development is not that simple if you want real useful applications. It has much in common with traditional client
server applications, it’s the unification of WEB applications and local applications.

The next thing I want to do is to develop something similar to Google Suggest.

I always want to write some more on javascript wigdets, AJAX… but having a full job, 2 young kids and a wonderful wife also needs some time.