AJAX, an early route to rich internet applications

Have you heard of RIA (rich internet applications)? If you haven’t, you can read
a few posts
where I’ve written about this “music of the future.” I’m also preparing a longer piece on RIA for Interval.cz. Today I
came across AJAX — Web or Desktop? on the
JAWAWEB blog.

AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is hardly revolutionary. A similar idea
has been around for years. The problem was poor support for client-side scripting
in browsers. That’s starting to turn around and AJAX is gradually going into use. To me,
Google’s extensive use of the approach in its beta services is proof. I expect AJAX
to be widely used to build the first wave of rich internet applications.

Two worthwhile references on AJAX are Jesse James Garrett’s Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications and the item and discussion on TSS, Sun Blueprints starts to address AJAX in J2EE.

Related articles

• (Dagblog, January 26, 2005) XML-RPC and a Possible Route to Richer Web Applications
• (Dagblog, August 15, 2004) Who Will Help Web Forms?
• (Dagblog, January 2, 2004) Web Browsers and the Future
• (Dagblog, January 22, 2004) Is the Flex Beta Program Opening to the Public?
• (Dagblog, December 19, 2003) Flex and the Web Application Framework
• (Dagblog, December 8, 2003) Web Applications Evolve with RIA (Rich Internet Applications)
• (Dagblog, December 1, 2003) XAML — Microsoft’s XUL
• (Dagblog, October 23, 2003) The Return of Smart Clients and the Twilight of “HTML Applications”?