Ajax versus Socket Connections

Ever have to argue Ajax versus Socket Connections? Me either. Today, I had the chance to talk about the differences, their advantages and their disadvantages.

Ajax has many advantages. You do not have to parse content/page headers, you can parse XML, you can build objects out of JSON serializations, and above all there are a lot of frameworks that are cross-browser friendly so you do not have to worry about writing the framework yourself.

A Socket Connections’ advantages are much smaller in my opinion. There is no browser limitations, which is a major advantage, keeping it browser independent. It can support any type of response content, JSON serializations, XML, HTML, strings, etc.

So what about the disadvantages? Ajax has the complications of cross-browser friendliness, but that has been removed by frameworks doing all that hard work for us. Ajax’s biggest disadvantage is probably the lack of JavaScript standards being followed by each browser. Though this is removed by using popular frameworks, it matters for the rest of your JavaScript code to setup the Ajax event.

So how about Socket Connections? Socket Connection have the complication of trying to figure out where the response data starts and where the response headers end. Secondly, they are language dependent. Not all languages support sockets and some may make it very complicated to use them though, whereas, Ajax is getting easier and easier to use.

What are your thoughts?