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Pascarello's co-author DAVE CRANE had a very thoughtful addition to the discussion as to what makes AJAX special:

"Ajax can be adopted incrementally, using the technologies and the skills that you're already using (i.e. the web browser). The barrier to entry is therefore very low for both web site owners and for developers.

It extends the reach of web apps from casual stuff like shopping and photo albums to serious heavy-usage scenarios. At the same time, it makes the casual stuff so much slicker and more fun to use.

It is encouraging a culture of collaboration between web sites (through the 'mashup' and 'web API' approach). This is unleashing a lot of creative thinking and energy right now."

#1 Marketing

• Developers = people always love to enrich their lives with the most popular trends, such as Nike Air Jordans, an Apple iPod, a Gucci purse, or Ajax.
• Ajax delivers a "cool" brand name for this suite of useful technologies, unifying the public perception.
• Ajax is an open solution that is not controlled by any one corporation or individual.
• Ajax was delivered at the time when developers were ready to embrace a common vision for the future of web application development.

#2 Technical feasibility

• Ajax provides plugin-free, browser-compatible interactivity to traditional Web applications.
• Desktop hardware advances have resolved many of the browser performance issues regarding JavaScript execution.
• Network hardware advances have resolved many of the network latency issues regarding JavaScript download and server communication.
• Developers need a community to discuss ideas and improve status quo solutions. "Ajax" has provided that community by unifying previously fragment efforts to improve web application development.

#3 Algorithm for success

(marketing brand + technical feasibility) * developer need * market timing precision = degree of success

Applied to Ajax:

("cool" + "genuinely useful") * "high" * "precise(Feb 2005)" = highly successful Ajax!

ERIC MIRAGLIA, expert on advanced JavaScript utilities and widgets works writes, from his desk at Yahoo!'s Presentation Platform Team:

"There came a time in the 1990s when most technologists realized something about themselves in relation to their computer: While they might spend 12 hours a day in front of the screen, they lost interest immediately and almost completely when that machine was taken offline. (Internet connection down? Well, then. What's on TV?) The atomic, unconnected workstation, as exciting as it was in the 1980s and early 1990s, was already an artifact, despite its rich "productivity application" ecosystem. We felt that way long before the internet became a good place to do anything except email, IM and web browsing.

But the romance of intertwingularity that grew out of our online activities hinted at a time when our experience of doing our most creative and productive work also would be infused with the of immediacy and connectedness that we got from the early web. We sensed that Netscape 4 wasn't the ultimate experience of global social productivity but rather a limited early technology preview. We sensed that there would be more to the web than pointing, clicking, and filling out forms (although that was more fun than we'd have guessed).

After a long period of stagnation in the basic platform on which the web is built, innovative developers have begun bootstrapping the next generation of connected experiences, enriching the medium to go beyond page-based link navigation and form entry. AJAX is critical to this because it allows us to build applications in which users can easily find their information, enhance it in context, and share the enhancements instantly and globally. Fewer clicks, greater immediacy, more and faster control - these are the hallmarks of AJAX-enabled interfaces. Because they address core weaknesses associated with the web in its Netscape 4 incarnation, we're quickly discovering that the new possibilities are potentially transformative.

Alan Cooper wrote 12 years ago that good applications create idioms to allow users to "get in the zone," an interactive zen in which the application itself almost disappears in favor of its idioms. AJAX moves us a step closer to allowing this to happen on the web by making the web-server/web-browser implementation model less relevant and allowing us to create applications whose mental model, the information metaphor presented to the user, has a much higher fidelity to the way the user actually thinks and feels about her data.

And when the implementation model goes away, what's left is just that user, her information, her tools for enhancing the information, and the world with which she wants to share it - a more refined state of intertwingularity."

NEXT PAGE: Final words from Zimbra Co-founder ROSS DARGAHI, Backbase Co-Founder & CEO JOUK PLEITER & RIA pioneer COACH WEI

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