Joel has a somewhat puzzling piece on the what he sees as the future of Ajax. He makes some excellent points about developing for the future and trusting that technology will catch up with your vision. I would say that any true technology company already knows this. Only internal IT departments code for the present. And that’s only if they’re lucky. Usually they’re developing for the past. Overall, the read is interesting, but it leaves one wondering how well acquainted Joel is with the current state of web development and the tools already available.

The comparison he draws between CICS and HTML is fair. But the fact that CICS systems are still in play means that HTML and HTTP will be around for a long time. The numerous JavaScript frameworks out there are pushing the limits to be sure, and allowing more and more UI goodness on the client side, but the browser is still a browser at the end of the day. Is all the hard work that’s been put into optimizing these JavaScript frameworks for naught? I suppose we will have to wait and see.

So what does Joel think is going to happen?

The winners are going to do what worked at Bell Labs in 1978: build a programming language, like C, that’s portable and efficient. It should compile down to “native” code (native code being JavaScript and DOMs) with different backends for different target platforms, where the compiler writers obsess about performance so you don’t have to. It’ll have all the same performance as native JavaScript with full access to the DOM in a consistent fashion, and it’ll compile down to IE native and Firefox native portably and automatically.

Unless I have seriously misunderstood the Google Web Toolkit, that is exactly what it does. OpenLazlo is another. I’m sure there are other tools I’m unaware of that do the same thing. (Joel’s own Wasabi does something similar, but not for Javascript.)

Further in, he speculates about the “NewSDK” built by “somebody you’ve never heard of, some bratty Y Combinator startup, maybe, is gaining ridiculous traction selling NewSDK, which combines a great portable programming language that compiles to JavaScript, and even better, a huge Ajaxy library that includes all kinds of clever interop features.” Who knows what Parakey was up to anyway?

Again, this is something that is already being done. Adobe has AIR and Flex. Microsoft has Silverlight. Sun has JavaFX. For online/offline synchronization, Google has Gears. The game is already in play. Sure, there are pieces missing. Identity management is MIA, but that may never change due to privacy concerns. No one likes having an ever growing list of passwords, but nobody likes trusting third parties either.

Does the future lie in any of these offerings? Perhaps. So far no one has succeeding in dethroning the browser for web applications.

Prototype: it’s the Javascript library that people seem to either love or hate. But whatever your opinion, it’s worth knowing that version 1.5 has been released. Accompanying the code: a new site, documentation and tutorials that just might change your mind if you’ve previously found protoype too opaque.