David A. Windham

Ajax is just lipstick on a pig

and i just had to post that again… the audience enthusiasm is awesome
Thanks Dave… I think my brother would agree…
If you use a browser to interact with a server, you’re using a half-duplex, forms-based device. The host sends down a form, you fill in the form, and send it back when you’re ready. This turns out to be really convenient for people running networks and servers. Because HTTP is stateless, and because applications talk to browsers using a fire-and-forget model, your servers and networks can handle very large numbers of devices. This is exactly the architecture that IBM championed back in the 70s. The half-duplex, poll-select nature of 3270-based applications allowed mainframes with less processing power than a modern toaster to handle tens of thousands of simultaneous users. The browser is really not much better than a 3270 (except the resolution is better when displaying porn). (Recently, folks have been trying to circumvent this simplicity by making browser-based applications more interactive using technologies such as Ajax. To my mind, this is just a stop-gap until we throw the browser away altogether—Ajax is just lipstick on a pig.).. continue

or some other links you may be interested in..
php vs rails.. and the comments are good
Squeak… notice that it’s on the laptop for every child
Seaside
Smalltalk
and i’d like to add my own comment to that php rails article.. any language that can bridge objective C with ruby… seems like it might be tougher to do this with php.. you can have your web apps and eat your software too!
cocoa