Web 2.0: AJAX underpins services

by Stacy Cowley
Be the first to comment | I like it!
More »
on this topic
March 24, 2006, 09:51 AM —  IDG News Service — 

Google Inc. has backed and acquired key players in the Web 2.0 world. Its biggest Web 2.0 splash, though, comes from internally created services.

Google's brain trust of coding and design talent has pushed Web development in so many innovative directions, programmers stand ready to follow its lead.

The company unwittingly catalyzed the mania around one of the year's most-talked-about technologies, AJAX. The acronym stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Extensible Markup Language), an unwieldy but potent bundle christened by Jesse James Garrett, the director of user experience strategy for Internet consultancy Adaptive Path. In February 2005, Garrett posted an essay on Adaptive Path's Web site dissecting how a new wave of Web applications uses a collection of technologies including JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to mimic the speed and smooth feel of desktop programs. Google's Gmail, Maps and Groups sites were among the examples Garrett cited to illustrate AJAX at work.

The essay unleashed a flood of feedback and commentary. AJAX rapidly passed into common developer lingo as software companies rushed out AJAX toolkits and press releases highlighting their own AJAX-compatible architectures.

"Week after week, the level of interest in AJAX that I'm seeing just keeps going up and up," Garrett said in a recent interview. "The really remarkable thing about the AJAX essay, and the thing we were really unprepared for, was the way that it resonated far beyond the design audience for which it was intended."

AJAX resonates now because the tech world is finally ready for it. In so many ways, Web 2.0 feels like dot-com d

» posted by abennett

IDG News Service

I like it!
Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Free books

Essential JavaFX
Get started building rich Web apps quickly with an introduction to the power of JavaFX key features -- scene node graphs, nodes as components, the coordinate system, layout options, colors and gradients, custom classes with inheritance, animation, binding, and event handlers.Enter now!

The Nomadic Developer
Consulting can be hugely rewarding, but it's easy to fail if you are unprepared. To succeed, you need a mentor who knows the lay of the land. Aaron Erickson is your mentor, and this is your guidebook. Enter now!

Featured Sponsor
Case Study: AISO grows its "green" business

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

Download this white paper »
Myth of the Million Dollar Database

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

Download this white paper »
Success Story: Weather.com handles whatever nature serves up

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Download this white paper »
Marketplace