Also, "You don't need to remember how an app works," Bosworth said. "There's a big difference between making something easy to use and making it productive." In other words, just because people can easily learn to use an application doesn't mean using the application will make them more productive.
In addition to these mistakes, the physics for AJAX were wrong in 1997, Bosworth said. For example, real applications turned out to need a lot of JavaScript, and, "In 1997 most modems were 19.2 and chips were 100 times slower than today," he said. Also, most applications either needed a large or unpredictable amount of data to flow over them or really fast on-demand loading of data, Bosworth said.
"In short, real apps were hideously slow," he said. The "physics" limitations hampered JavaScript, and the alternative, Java, "was just too slow to have to move everything through a VM [virtual machine]," Bosworth said.
To illustrate his point, Bosworth asked the audience to imagine a keyboard where there's a 10-second lag before what you type appears on the screen. "You don't get a pencil and start writing and it takes 10 seconds to get on the page," he said.
