AJAX

Internet based applications are here to stay, some of them competing and outperforming their rival desktop based applications.

Innovations in web designing have thrown open platforms to developers that have no relation to the underlying OS’s. This is pretty much in line with Jason Kottke’s ideas.

Asynchronous Javascript and XML, a programming technique that’s more commonly referred to as AJAX has tremendously improved the way these web based applications interact with data, thereby dramatically improving the performance of these applications.

With AJAX, some of the major limitations of traditional web based applications, like page refreshes in order to update data on the page, can be avoided.

Some of the applications that have been creating waves, like Google’s Gmail, Google Maps etc run on AJAX.

Microsoft will soon be making an entry into this playground with its own AJAX toolbox, which is called Atlas, for ASP.net users to build web based applications. However we can expect Atlas to be hooked up to the Windows OS.