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Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach. All of the
major products Google has introduced over the last year — Orkut, Gmail, the
latest beta version of Google Groups, Google Suggest, and Google Maps — are
Ajax applications. (For more on the technical nuts and bolts of these Ajax
implementations, check out these excellent analyses of Gmail, Google Suggest,
and Google Maps.) Others are following suit: many of the features that people
love in Flickr depend on Ajax, and Amazon’s A9.com search engine applies
similar techniques. These projects demonstrate that Ajax is not only
technically sound, but also practical for real-world applications. This isn’t
another technology that only works in a laboratory. And Ajax applications can
be any size, from the very simple, single-function Google Suggest to the very
complex and sophisticated Google Maps. At Adaptive Path, we’ve been doing our
own work with Ajax over the last several months, and we’re realizing we’ve only
scratched the surface of the rich interaction and responsiveness that Ajax
applications can provide. Ajax is an important development for Web
applications, and its importance is only going to grow. And because there are
so many developers out there who already know how to use these technologies, we
expect to see many more organizations following Google’s lead in reaping the
competitive advantage Ajax provides. Moving Forward The biggest challenges in
creating Ajax applications are not technical. The core Ajax technologies are
mature, stable, and well understood. Instead, the challenges are for the
designers of these applications: to forget what we think we know about the
limitations of the Web, and begin to imagine a wider, richer range of
possibilities
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