Wired News does seem to follow rather than lead...or...I just keep up well enough to see it that way. But in this article they really play up Ajax. I wonder if they go too far though.
I wonder just how far MS's Atlas will go. Will it be just another attempt to break standards and promot ASP.net? We've seen it too many times. Sorry if MS is out in the cold in the open source community...I wonder why?
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68403,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_4
snip
You Say You Want a Web Revolution - By Ryan Singel
The Netscape threat that led Microsoft to wage the browser war and cross swords with antitrust regulators around the world is -- at long last -- poised to become reality.
Software experts say recent innovations in web design are ushering in a new era for internet-based software applications, some of the best of which already rival desktop applications in power and efficiency. That’s giving software developers a wide open platform for creating new programs that have no relation to the underlying operating system that runs a PC.
Evidence of this evolution has been popping up everywhere in recent months, with examples that include Google's online map rendering software and its Gmail service, Amazon's A9 search engine and NetFlix's DVD rental platform. All highlight a dramatic rethinking of web applications, using a programming technique dubbed AJAX (for asynchronous JavaScript and XML) that significantly improves how web pages interact with data, for the first time rivaling programs that run natively on the desktop.
"For a user it is fundamentally different -- it feels like a real application," said Rael Dornfest, chief technology officer for O'Reilly Media.
AJAX overcomes a severe limitation in traditional web interfaces, which must reload anytime they try to call up new data. By contrast, AJAX lets users manipulate data without clicking through to a new page, Dornfest said. That's putting an end to page refreshes and other interruptions that have handicapped wweb-based applications until now.
Web developers are creating AJAX code libraries and conventions to ease the burden of making applications that speak several computer languages. Even Microsoft is getting into the game, albeit with hooks that aim to keep it tethered to its Windows OS. The company recently announced it is developing its own AJAX toolbox, called Atlas, for web developers who use Microsoft's ASP.NET technologies to build websites.
