Ajax has come a long way in a year’s time. Last year around this time, we first heard about it. Ajax had brought about the a big difference in web applications which largely changed usability arena. Web Applications started looking like rich desktop applications. Let’s look at its journey from rebirth.
First the benefits related to Ajax started emerging with Google Map, GMail providing live examples of its benefit. It really drew people with its attraction. As people started exploring more, saw the flip side of Ajax coin, its drawbacks. There were security issues that started rising with Ajax usage. Meanwhile, big players were playing more a wait and watch game to determine Ajax potential. Open source arena was ready to take up challenge and in a small time frame saw various open source Ajax libraries and frameworks floating over net. Even Microsoft was not far behind and came up with its Ajax framework called “Atlas“. Ajax resources, the libraries and frameworks, started growing, at rapid pace. People started feeling the need of having Ajax implementation for their site. But everyone had one question in mind, are we really ready to adopt Ajax to improve usability? Though the resources were growing but people were afraid of adopting it due to its unorganized manner. This brought into picture the waiting big giants who started “Open Ajax” project to tackle these issues. And Yahoo too has open sourced its UI Library and framework.
So what’s next in Ajax Domain? Here are few areas where I think it will grow:
- More organized and sophisticated design patterns and open source libraries
- Ajax becoming integral part of IDEs
- Watch out Portal and CMS space and Ajax
- Ajax making more heads in Reporting Area
- Javascript standards across browers
- Steep raise in Usability
Happy Birthday, Ajax !!!!!!!!!