Top Five Reasons Why AJAX Is So Hard

5th :: Emerging P & P
While some work has been done in this area, notably on http://ajaxpatterns.org/ and a few books, this area of patterns & practices is still young and in flux.
4th :: Javascript
From Javascript Object Notation (JSON) to the various ways that object-orientation can be emulated and from error handling to the different ways that browsers implement and add to it, Javascript is just one more language that you have to master.

3rd :: Hard to Maintain
Lacking good physical or logical encapsulation stories, much AJAX code is inline or in various loosely referenced files or dynamically emitted. Reuse, distribution, and referencing is difficult to say the least.
2nd :: Hard to Test and Debug
There is still a lack of quality coherent tooling to support testing and debugging, and the multiplicity of browsers makes these issues difficult to overcome.

#1 :: Browser Differences
Everything about a running AJAX-based application is affected by browser differences from the interpretation of HTML, CSS, and Javascript to the implementation of the HTML Document Object Model (DOM), the Browser DOM, the XML DOM, and even the XMLHttpRequest object itself.

Rich Controls and World Peace!

Well, okay, we can do half of that! We do have rich controls that do AJAX for you. Just flip a switch, set a property, and voila, you have AJAX. Try it now and see for yourself!

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