The latest buzzword acronym, AJAX, is getting on my nerves. Javascript is not cool. It's an annoying, slow language. If you have ever written code in Python or Ruby or Lua, you'll agree that the syntax and library sucks.

Usually I'm annoyed by the long loading times of Ajax, so please use it only where it's absoultely necessary.

I agree that google maps is cool, because the alternatives would have been an even slower pure html version, an annoying flash which doesn't work properly (say hello to 'new' yahoo maps) or a very slowly starting java applet.

I watched the Ruby on Rails and TurboGears intro screencasts today, because I wanted to find out how these frameworks are like to work with. The part I liked least was then in the turbogears screencast they did that pointless ajax thingy, writing javascript code and such...

I liked the template engine of turbogears, python "kid". Thats a really nice XMLish template language. Read: proper XML, XHTML.

Ruby on Rails templates had this ancient eperl feeling to me. Also kind of PHP like, but not as worse. In contrast to PHP you can actually parse it. Still, you can't properly validate your XHTML template files.

So I'll probably try out TurboGear sometime soon, and if I'm not happy with it maybe Ruby on Rails next. I'm very happy to see these new frameworks for free languages. I heard a lot about Java Frameworks recently, but they all seemed so overengineered, and then there is this Java annoyance... A python or ruby solution is much nicer there.