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Having released the latest version of our EBA Grid AJaX control there was a nice comment posted by someone who was expressing their feelings about our new Grid control product not being Firefox compatible (which we really are working hard on). He seemed to think that building products that only support Internet Explorer is “lazy and arrogant”. This type of response seems all too familiar from the open source / Firefox zealot crowd - not that I some sort of M$ evangelist.

In response I thought Iwould give everyone out there a better idea of what drives our commercial AJaX development.

Sure everyone always says this and I will say it again, we have been doing AJaX since before it was AJaX. In fact our first AJaX software was a point of sale system (see bottom left of our site from the Internet Archive) that never really got much up-take - ok maybe making a web based, let alone AJaX, point of sale system was a bit crazy for 2000 much like WebOS was [1]. The point being that we have been targeting Internet Explorer AJaX users for some time. This stems from the fact that Microsoft’s MSDN is a superb resource that made it easy to get up to speed on XML, XMLHTTP and all things DHTML and not mention the fact that no other browser has the XMLHTTPRequest object. In the process of building that software (and some other subsequent software like our unnoticed AJaX content management system from 2002) we built several components that are now slowly morphing into products themselves such as our Grid and Combo products. With the AJaX hype up-take has been good.

As a small business we have two goals - providing good jobs for smart local people and having some fun. To that end, it is desirable to be able to pay the bills and stay in business. With that in mind it’s really dead easy to understand what drives our product choices - our customers. Since over 90% of our target market is IE based and our products were originally developed with IE it just makes sense. As the market has shifted and Firefox usage is growing, we are responding as quickly as any small business on a limited budget can.

So we did not start building our products only when AJaX became popular and, unlike many others, had these products when IE was the only browser supporting AJaX. Sadly, as a business we cannot react as fast as the bleeding edge, working all night, has a day job, free software types that are now jumping on the AJaX band wagon. One of the big problems for us, and where using component driven development provides a lot of value for our customers, is the amount of time it takes to test AJaX applications on all the relevant versions of Firefox for example which all have various quirks not only between versions but even between optimized and regular builds.

This brings me to another issue which is the fact that as a small business we cannot act fast enough to take advantage of the interest in AJaX without selling our souls…more on this later.

References

[1] MyWebOS - Dave Johnson, July 14, 2005