Will the AJAX bubble burst?

Sun and Microsoft, the companies behind Java and .NET, are racing to expand AJAX support in their web frameworks. Google is releasing a web toolkit of its own, and the technical press keeps bombarding us with news of the latest AJAX framework or who supports what. It looks like a bubble and grows like a bubble. Will it burst like one?

AJAX is a classic bubble with relatively little bang for a lot of bucks. Development is inefficient, debugging is hard, and testing is harder still. If I had to sum it up, I’d call it a way to hack around good old HTTP in today’s browsers. So why is the AJAX bubble growing?

There are two main reasons. The internet as a medium is shifting toward a web of applications, and the browser is turning into an all-in-one application platform. AJAX is the most practical, and unfortunately the only, way right now to meet the needs of the application web in browsers that haven’t become all-in-one platforms.

The AJAX bubble is bound to burst, and everything points that way. What will be the pin? Microsoft’s new operating system and XAML, perhaps? The basic requirement is that the technology has to be widely available in browsers. It’s hard to say how something like XAML will fare in browsers built on Gecko.

Lots of questions, few answers and even more speculation. But one thing is already clear, and you can bet on it. The AJAX bubble will burst…