A Simple Task Managment Solution
If you read this blog regularly you will know that I favorite “simple” apps. HiTask.com falls into this category and has created a very nice Task Management App.
Now there are plenty of these types of apps available online but I fell for HiTask’s great use of ajax. This is one of those web apps which makes you feel like you’re using a desktop application.
HiTask is free and allows you to manage meetings, tasks, notes, birthdays and reminders, plus team management and a iCalendar feed.
Technorati Tags: task managment, web app, web 2.0
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Actually, if you look into the workings of the site, HiTask’s use of Ajax is pretty weak, which is pretty well visible if your connection is anything below 2mb/s in bandwidth.
Here are some points:
- all HTML is loaded at once, not as Ajax principles dictate - piece by piece when needed
- HTML is bloated, with massive use of deprecated attributes, including style attribute as well as javascript event binders such as onclick, which makes the code a “tag soup”.
- JS is also a huge chunk of functions mixing the framework driven approach to scripting this language with the raw approach in an illogical way, being downloaded all in one big chunk, not when needed. Some functions are totally redundant, like one which gets form elements. Using prototype or jquery, you can do the thing in one short line of code.
- CSS suffers from lack of Cascading and redundancy of declarations, which makes it unoptimal.
- “Listening” for updates happens in the old raw polling the server through xmlhttprequest way, which is 10years obsolete by now. One should use google’s approach or flash socket connection for such purposes, with a proper Python/C /Java serverside daemon.
All in all, the site’s bandwidth load doesn’t fit to be called Ajax, as Ajax is principally about low-latency, on-demand data transfers, not delivering huge chunks of mostly redundant code, thus quite effectively clumping the browser down with useless operations.
The application could be around 3times smoother and have more dektopy-feeling if proper Ajax practices were used.
Thanks Ajax Dev, I guess youve shown how little I know about the technical side of things. I probably didnt notice this as much due to the fact I do have the fastest connection available. Maybe I should get you to do the Ajax reviews in the future lol
Was planning to set up my own tech blog anyway
I jumped in for a remark just because you said great use of Ajax.
This site is nice and well working and the stuff to the point one wonders why this haven’t been done before, BUT it’s not really Ajax in the technological understanding.
Yes, it uses xmlhttprequest and probably also the iframe/script src background loads, but Ajax is more than that.
These kind of techs were known well before the term ‘Ajax’ was coined and HiTask actually uses them the pre-Ajax way.
Actually seeing the quality and structure of code I’d say these guys aint catching up on Google or Yahoo unless they hire some guru.
I also actually happen to know them personally, that’s part of the reason why I’m not so into this HiTask hype, lol.