Re: [whatwg/xhr] Abandon hope of removing sync XHR from the web platform? (#20)

Removing the ability to perform synchronous AJAX calls will certainly make my life far more difficult. As a business oriented web and desktop designer/developer I often face the challenge of modelling a highly synchronous process into a asynchronous program/web application - this is a problem that has been around for many years and will be around long after I have ceased programming. Examples of this problem are applications that require user interaction and do large database updates, file updates/reads, javascript web apps that maintain state with a server and passing data to other computers on a network, network messaging.

Unfortunately many business processes are synchronous (i.e. step B cannot be performed until step A is complete). Many synchronous processes can be modelled (i.e. programmed) using an event driven system. The major problem with such an approach (i.e. using asynchronous programming to represent a synchronous process) is how you deal with gap between submitting a request and receiving the reply (we could all start mining for bitcoins). In short the user has to wait for the reply regardless of whether the program is synchronous or asynchronous - the main advantage of the asynchronous approach is you can enable the user to abort the process before it is completed (totally unacceptable in many business applications).

The solution to this problem is to ensure that the back-end server, that is servicing the AJAX request, is man enough for the job and the application has been intelligently designed. Removing this facility to cure the problems caused by useless designers and developers is totally stupid (similar to the people causing this problem).


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