Where and When to Use AJAX

AJAX is now dominating on how to make a nice website. Most big sites uses AJAX, but does AJAX should be used also on your website? Here's an article from IBM about Where and when to use AJAX. It should give you some brief explanation when to use and when NOT to use AJAX.

Change of Requirements

Ten days ago, i wrote a blog post about IBM's new office suite which requires huge requirements. When i came back to the requirements page, the information has changed. The requirements needed to install IBM Lotus Symphony has been reduced into:

* Supported Windows® platforms: Windows XP, Windows Vista

* Supported Linux platforms: SLED 10, RHEL 5

* 750MB disk space minimum on Linux and 540M on Windows

* 512MB RAM memory minimum

That's great, BUT, there are additional notes that i didn't see before (or probably i missed it, so i just put them here):

* On Linux, you need to perform either of the following actions before you can print the license page during installation:
- Install a correct driver for your local printer.
- Or use your current Postscript printer and set the GhostScript pre-filtering as Convert to PS level 1 on the Advanced tab.

* You must uninstall Lotus Symphony before you switch to a different account on the same machine to re-install Lotus Symphony.

* On Window Vista, you cannot install Lotus Symphony from a remote server.

* The installation folder should contain valid characters only.

Bigger Requirements

I already have a feeling that someday, IBM will release it's office application to the public, but i don't expect this soon (after the announcements that they will join OOo for the collaboration). When i saw the news (via Vavai), i tried to gather more information about this and i browsed their site.

At first, i was amazed on the user interface. It has better interface than OOo (even though it's said that it used the same OOo code for this product). It has good icon also. BUT.. what surprise me more is the requirements:

* Supported Windows platforms: Windows XP, Windows Vista
* Supported Linux platforms: SLED 10, RHEL 5, Redhat5
* 900MB disk space minimum
* 1GB RAM memory minimum
* US English locale

They support fewer platform, and need more resources than OOo. Also, it's only available on US English for now (does i18n version will follow soon?). Well, it's their debuts and they still have plenty of time to make this application better along with(out) OOo community.