I don't want AJAX in my banking software
BankSimple's attempt to build a better bank intrigues me. But I do wonder if the innovative new banking frontend they announced will be a Web 2.0ish affair with lots of modal dialogs and spinner wheels. Because I don't want AJAX in my online banking.
Not too long ago, the form oriented, Web 1.0 approach to application design was lauded as one of the reasons why software was moving from the desktop to the web. Web 1.0 applications had to play by a strict set of rules defined by limitations of browser technology at the time. This was considered a good thing, for it gave users a way to understand and control their interaction with a service.
But in order to satisfy the hunger for richer interfaces, applications have come into vogue whose screens cannot be bookmarked, saved to disk or navigated with the back button. Submitting a form or following a hyperlink are no longer transparent mechanisms for the user to understand their interaction with an application. Opening links in new tabs gives us a blank page, reloading a screen takes us to a different place, and an ever-busy loading indicator reminds us of our browser constantly performing requests we never initiated.
Most of the time, the productivity gained by rich interfaces makes up for the loss of control and transparency. But when it comes to my finances, control and transparency is all I care about. When I transfer money, I don't want the transaction form show a cute spinner wheel that may or may not update parts of my screen. I want the form to do a stupid POST request. 1995 style.
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So you are basically saying that you don’t want to take advantage of OpenBanking features like sharing your account balance with friends, “People who transfered money to this person, also paid for …” and APIs and widgets that display your bank transfers on your blog? Sounds kinda closed, this whole walled garden approach… ;)
There is actually a service called Blippy which shares your credit card transactions with your friends. This is great because more promiscuity for my personal finances is exactly what I need.
In fact many, if not all of those shortcomings you describe are perfectly capable of bypassing in AJAX these days. Numerous libraries are available (both for frameworks or stand-alone) that can manipulate the url’s via javascript to allow history, refreshing, tabs, etc to remain usable. It’s also possible to allow standard fall-backs when javascript is turned off.
Condemning forward progress due to poor programming practices that have been used in the past seems like quite a backwards thought process. Surely it would be better to campaign for web applications to be done right?
@Kevin: I understand that workarounds and graceful fallbacks are available. Few applications go through the pain of actually implementing them, due to the added complexity in code and testing (which are legtimate concerns).
But even with those measures implemented, AJAX applications inherently have more moving parts than their form oriented counterparts. They are harder to test and more prone to errors caused by browser quirks or concurrent user input.
Frameworks nowadays do a good job of hiding the underlying complexity. But for use cases such as banking, I’m happy about every moving part I can remove from my design.