Thirty years ago. The Soviet Union. On election day people would gather at the voting centers to select Leonid Brezhnev. Who do you vote for – Leonid Breznev or Leonid Brezhnev? You pick! This was one extreme.

When I ‘ve arrived to the USA, I was overwhelmed by the variety of everything. Which cereal, tv, car, sofa, audio to select? There is so many of them…I was lost! Please someone help! This was another extreme.

AJAX advocates often use this argument: “With AJAX you do not need to be locked in with any vendor as opposed to Flex (Adobe) Silverlight (Microsoft) or Java (Sun). Just use freely available JavaScript, CSS, HTML, XMLHttpRequest and you are set. ”

Is it really so? Then, AJAX vendors (contradicting the AJAX advocates) add the following phrase to their brochures: “With our framework you do need to write JavaScript manually “.

Fine. Let me select the framework XYZ (locking myself in with the vendor of XYZ). How many AJAX vendors are there? There is an open AJAX developer ‘s survey. It has only three questions. But please look at the question number 3 that lists your choices. Please select the one you like… if you can. The creator of this survey realizes, that he might have forgotten some other AJAX framework, hence the field Other at the end of this laundry list.

I hate selecting Brezhnev from Brezhnev, but I do not want to see this variety of frameworks either.