September 16, 2005
(Computerworld)
LOS ANGELES -- Microsoft Corp. this week offered more details of its plan to bring out tools that can more easily build thin-client applications with rich features native to the desktop.
The company presented a developer preview of Atlas, the code name for a new Web-client framework to help developers build Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or Ajax-style, applications at its Professional Developers Conference here. Ajax is a method of building Web-based interactive "rich-client" applications that process user requests immediately without reloading an entire Web page.
Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president for platforms, said Atlas will let developers provide users with a richer Web application experience. And developers won't have to be expert in Dynamic HTML or JavaScript to build such applications, he said.
Microsoft officials declined to estimate a delivery date or price tag for the tool set.
Vladimir Morozov, senior Web developer at H&R Block Inc. in Kansas City, Mo., said his company began a pilot program last year to use homegrown XML technology to build interfaces for new Web applications. A tool like Atlas might allow the company to reuse user interface designs for the 7,000 screens used for tax-filing applications, he said. With the current technology, each Web page must be changed individually.
John Bastow, development manager at Vitale, Caturano & Co., a Boston-based accounting firm, said his company can't afford the development investment required to create rich-client applications.
Based on Microsoft's description of the tool, Atlas "will allow us to create nicer UIs [user interfaces]," he said. "We don't generally spend the time to make them look as nice as Atlas would."
Southern Company Inc., the IT arm of Atlanta-based power company Southern Co., started moving applications to the Web more than four years ago.
Southern has two client/server applications with more than 150 screens that it's converting from SQL Windows to .Net-based client/server rather than the Web, because it's currently less expensive to do line-by-line conversion than it is to rearchitect the applications, said Michael Peters, a technical consultant at Southern.
Gregory Floyd, also a technical consultant at Southern, said Ajax should entail writing less than an eighth of the code now needed for building rich interfaces. Ajax will be most useful to Southern in its ability to retrieve information for users in near real time, he said.
Steve McClure, an analyst at market research company IDC, said Microsoft will need to provide more detail in the coming months on how applications built with Atlas will manage the user experience. "There is a lot more to the UI than visualization - making videos fancier doesn't mean the UI is better," McClure said.
Atlas will include a set of extensions to Active Server Pages .Net 2.0 that can be accessed through Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft officials said.