AJAX, the standard

There is updates on W3C work about XMLHttpRequest, but you'll find a post prior to this talking in details about the W3C Working Draft of the XMLHttpRequest Object which have been released on December 27, 2006. This is in addition to the work of the OpenAjax Alliance lead by IBM and which include most important actors in Ajax technology. Open AJAX alliance have released a White Paper where you can find more about the technology and the activity of the group.

AJAX involve the web client, JavaScript and server-side capabilities together, the reason why many organizations and companies are involved to make a standard for AJAX.

AJAX and Flash

I agree with many experts that AJAX have lots to learn from flash for rich media capabilities, but in the same time I find that AJAX have many advantages especially that you won't have to download a client, there is no problems of version compatibilities, the necessary for the end-user already exist : a browser with Javascript support.

I was looking at phpmagazine's stats for 2006 and noticed for Flash the different versions used over the year. Version goes from 7.0 to 9.0, so if I have flash website wich require Flash 9 for example there will be 82% of visitors who'll have to update their clients.

AJAX Meetings

Conferences, seminars and workshops in 2006 was very important to exchange ideas, create new business opportunities and share AJAX experience with other professionals. It began with O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, The Ajax Experience, XTECH conference, One Day Workshop and finished by First AJAX Business Conference in Zurich.

Commercial AJAX

In addition to free tools available for developers there is many interesting commercial software for AJAX, I have named already Morfik WebOS, there is bunch of great tools from Scand LLC, Also SmartClient, Javeline DeskRun, Visual WebGui, AjaxFaces, TIBCO, Backbase and many others.Commercial AJAX software show a maturity of the technology, but we have to look also in the commercial AJAX applications created or the implementation of AJAX in commercial applications as many have already did to improve their applications and of course generate more sales.

AJAX in Government

This is a topic that I rarely talk about it, but since I'm directly involved with e-Government and web application development for Government administrations in intranet and extranet mainly, it's interesting to notice that AJAX is helping considerably to make a big change in the way that Government administrations work and will bring desktop application in a very easy and friendly way to the enduser. I'll certainly talk more in details about this in the future, but I'll be interested to hear experience of AJAX usage in e-Gov in your country.

Conclusion

2006 was already the year of AJAX, but I think in 2007 "AJAX" won't be anymore a buzzword like before but the technology will be more mature and widely adopted in web application development. But what do we need to make AJAX better, more experiences, more implementations, IDEs and tools, seminars and workshops ... ?