I have been playing and testing the available alpha version of the Microsofts new kid on the Ajax block – The Atlas. Atlas is an add-on for the Visual Studio 2005 and is the response to all those javascript libraries available on the market, to all those Web 2.0123 applications which have appeared on the net in the past years.
There are no doubts, as it is an early version, a lot of the functionality is going to change and starting building important applications on the Atlas at the very moment is not the best decision – we mortals do know what is going to be different in its next version.
After experimenting available for the download examples and playing a little bit around i have decided for me, that as long as i wont see something close to the release candidate of it – i am going to stick to the “usual suspects”.
So, what about the first Atlas coming ? Honestly saying – i am a bit disappointed, as i was expecting a little bit more “robust” product, less quantity (no 100’s of kilobytes) and more quality (less bugs). Also i am a bit surprised by the “xml-script” appearance. I don’t know if we need one more xml translation script language at this very moment. Wasn’t Microsoft developing its own version of the Mozilla’s XUL ? I don’t think it is reasonable to go into the 2 direction at the same time, when everyone else goes the third one, but hey, i know the history of the Microsoft, and their capabilities of changing the things =O)
Today I was thinking a lot about Backbase and their future. From one side Atlas will help them to break into the bigger masses, but from the other side – it will probably sweep away the biggest market share, and i would still prefer a smaller fish to get bigger, instead of the bigger sharks consuming everyone around.
No, the world is still spinning in the very same direction, and the xHTML code produced by Visual Studio + Atlas is still invalid as it shouldn’t be, some exclusive IE things (nothing unexpected here, but still it hurts a bit).
Waiting for the next coming, as there are no doubts, it should be more interesting…