AJAX: The Past, Present, and Future

Based on the current news and events, now is the time to be an AJAX developer.

When I first read the AJAX flagship article from Jesse James Garrett called AJAX: A New Approach to  Web Applications, back in February 2005 (I can't believe it's been that long), I started diving into it immediately and created some applications using AJAX. Heck, who wouldn't.

Here we are today, looking over the technology landscape and its awesome that one man's idea and the discovery of one simple method could make such a impact in the technology industry.

Don't believe me? Check this out.

There are tons of AJAX frameworks (1) out there including Microsoft Atlas, Adobe Spry, and various others are popping up every month. If you are a serious web developer, you may want to find a company or technique that has a framework accustomed to your development style...FAST!

BZ Research conducted a survey in July of this year and found out that 3 out of 4 developers are planning or are using AJAX to create AJAX-based Rich Internet Applications. SDTimes.com covered this report on September 1, 2006 issue. More and more developers are moving towards AJAX, but some developers don't like all that bulky JavaScript attached to their pages.

One tool I've been using called Moo.Fx uses AJAX, but they recently released MooTools, which provides all of their existing tools in one complete package and its small enough that you can extract what you need from the libraries while keeping your code compact and fast.

The Future

Remember I was talking about Microsoft Atlas? Well, Microsoft's own Scott Guthrie reported that they will be releasing Atlas 1.0 (ref: Ajaxian) as a product and it will be completely supported by Microsoft. They said it will ship and snap onto ASP.NET and easily integrate into Visual Studio 2005. ZDNet even covered the news about the announcement.

As you can see, AJAX already has the staying power in the technology industry and will continue to be integrated into more and more existing IDE environments and applications.

Even more reason to continue using AJAX.