The Fjax methodology was recently released to the web development community for the purpose of simplifying AJAX-style development. Its unconventional approach - using Flash as a non-presentational element (an XML parsing engine) – has caused a good amount of buzz, along with some controversy.

Developers Jay and Steve McDonald (pictured) came up with Fjax as a solution to the perennial AJAX problem – the depth of browser-compatibility that AJAX needs, as all behind the scenes activity is done on AJAX, and each browser parses XML uniquely. Fjax works a lot like AJAX — it uses an XML file to pass data to a browser — except that it uses a tiny bit of Flash, instead of the browser, to parse the XML. All of that browser-specific code is eliminated, leaving the application more lightweight and putting less of a strain on the browser.

The developers claim that Flash will do a better parsing job than a normal Ajax. Speaking to Sys-con Media, Jay McDonald said, “We knew this would be a real paradigm shift for people. When you say ‘Flash’ people always think of Flash ‘movies’ – something visual. The initial response made it clear how entrenched this idea really is. But as more people get it, the feedback is pretty positive.”

Speaking on how Fjax came to be, Steve McDonald told us, “As a professional, I found cross-browser Ajax coding to be cumbersome, and I wanted something that would make development easier and faster. Based on what we’re seeing since releasing Fjax, it seems that a lot of people in the community were feeling a similar desire.

What do the McDonalds' want for Fjax in future? Jay says, “We’re hoping that its simplicity will help get more people working with functionality that had been reserved for the technical elite. I’m really not a hard-core programmer, while Steve eats code for breakfast. We wanted to bridge that gap, and lower the bar to entry.”

The McDonalds' say that Fjax is a lot different from other AJAX-Flash combos such as Adobe’s Flex. According to the Fjax website, it's not a replacement for toolsets that provide presentation-layer visual gizmos. On the contrary, it’s a new engine to put under the hood of all the great widgets that are already out there. Unlike other solutions, Fjax does not display in Flash.

Says Steve, “ Moving forward, we’re hoping that this behind-the-scenes use of Flash as a programming tool (instead of a presentational tool) might cause Adobe to explore some new avenues of development for future releases, and leverage the fact that Flash (via Actionscript) provides an environment for scripting that’s based on ECMA-262 Edition 4. Word is that the browsers (while still on Edition 3) will continue to have their own slightly different ‘flavors’. So Flash, while yet another new flavor of ECMAScript, could provide a browser-agnostic coding implementation (something that JavaScript and JScript will not likely get together to do).”