Is Ajax gonna kill the web frameworks

James Strachan has written some flame bait with Is Ajax gonna kill the web frameworks :)

His contention is that:

The Java eco system has zillions of web frameworks from JSF, Tapestry, Struts, WebWork, Spring WebFlow to things like JSP/JSTL/Velocity etc. There`s probably a new web framework born every day in Java some place.

However if the world really does go Ajax or some kinda client technology very Ajax like - will that cause these traditional HTML/HTTP web frameworks to become legacy

Web frameworks spend most of their time doing things like, dealing with HTTP and HTML, maintaining client side state on the server - handing intermediate form submissions & validation, templating/rendering issues and binding business objects to HTML form controls etc.

These days Ajax has template engines, XPath/XSLT engines, SOAP stacks, XForms implementations and so forth all done on the client side. You can do clever things like hide the JavaScript from your HTML page and use CSS to bind the JavaScript to the markup.

So is the web application of the future going to be static HTML & JavaScript, served up by Apache with Ajax interacting with a bunch of XML based web services (maybe using SOAP, maybe just REST etc) If so, do we really need a web framework thats focussed on HTTP and HTML, or are we just gonna end up developing a bunch of XML based web services and letting Ajax do all the templating, editing and viewing

I definitely see how more code is going to be running on the client with Ajax, and you even get into an interesting paradigm of MVC on the client talking to MVC on the server.

We still need something on the server though, and depending on the app, the bulk of the work could be on the server side still, so we still need frameworks there to deal with it.

The big question is who will win out of:

• Loose Coupling: I develop my client side in one world, and just talk to web services that are developed by the server team
• Tight Coupling: I use a tool that lets me build applications, and it generates the bindings between the ajax client and server piece

What do you think