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Great to see Ajax in Action out there. It is a nice size volume, and talks about important ideas in Ajax.

There are other books out too, such as Foundations of Ajax, and the new Pragmatic Ajax (http://pragprog.com/titles/ajax) done by the Ajaxian guys (http://ajaxian.com/)

If you're fortunate enough to see it in action on Yahoos's new email, you will be impressed. You can take a look here http://www.ajaxian.com/archives/2005/09/yahoo_mail _beta_1.html.

• any crazy plugin you can think of you can find and install very easily for WP - the community is huge and helpful
• while neither admin UI is really that great, wordpress' is a bit more intuitive then movable type's
• six apart is trying to run a business, more power to them, but the WP team is trying to build the best open source blogging engine first, and make some money second. it shows
• speed of development - the WP team is over hauling the admin interface to have live preview, adding true multi-user blogs, and other neat stuff with 1.6 - from what I've read in the community the MT platform has been relatively stagnant with the 3.x versions.

Mr. Critical Guy,
I am sorry, I can't explain the buzz to be honest. I also can't explain why this posting actually made it on to slashdot as there isn't technical meat in it.
For some reason if you mention Ajax || Web 2.0 || Google || Microsoft || Apple || Linux, you are a sure thing right? ;)
I think that the reason that the term Ajax took off, isn't due to the name itself (most people aren't fans due to the other million things that are out there) but it gave us one word to explain the concept.
Now, the concept itself is very fluffy isn't it. I personally don't subscribe to the technical view (that it has to be XHR and XML ...). All I care about is the fact that we are now finally able to make server side calls whenever we want, and can update a piece of the page instead of redrawing everything.
This is the shift in thinking that is now making into the mainstream (even though we have been doing this in general for years with many techniques including XHR).
Cheers,
Dion

You have hit two of the hot ones.

The event model is painful to work with cross browser. That is why we have to have our own code abstracting things away, or using the good frameworks out there that do this (Dojo, Zimbra, ...).

There are lots of features such as offline capabilities, browser side caches, etc... but the most bang for the buck is just getting the browsers to actually implement all of the standards correctly. This is in DOM, CSS, HTML, JavaScript.

If this gap can keep closing (it is a lot better now than a few years ago) then I will be happy.

The big scare is that MS goes nuts and breaks everything :)

MS said that they consider some of SVG not hardware acceleratable (er, really?) and that is why they have a kinda subset within XAML.

Canvas in IE would be great too.

And a nice JavaScript VM (HotSpot-able), that doesn't leak memory would be great too.

Dion

I agree that there is a lot of hype out there. As is often the case, the hype machine doesn't come from the people actually using it. We have been interviewing Ajax developers on our Audible Ajax podcast, and as always, the developers are not religious "Ajax everywhere, it is a silver bullet!" nuts. They are pragmatic, know when it makes sense, and when it doesn't. And, they also know the pain points. I for one hope the hype doesn't ruin things by setting the expectations as crazy as they are. Ajax is great in that it gives you reach, and is built on open standards. It is causing browsers to give us APIs that we have wanted for a long time, and can take the web to the next level, along with other technologies. There is a long way to go though. We need to learn when to use it, and need to focus on usability in general, and not using Ajax just because it is cool. We do a lot of Ajax consulting, and one of the biggest things we do is get people away from the question "so I want you to build an Ajax application". Cheers, Dion

I agree that there is a lot of hype out there. As is often the case, the hype machine doesn't come from the people actually using it. We have been interviewing Ajax developers on our Audible Ajax podcast, and as always, the developers are not religious "Ajax everywhere, it is a silver bullet!" nuts. They are pragmatic, know when it makes sense, and when it doesn't. And, they also know the pain points. I for one hope the hype doesn't ruin things by setting the expectations as crazy as they are. Ajax is great in that it gives you reach, and is built on open standards. It is causing browsers to give us APIs that we have wanted for a long time, and can take the web to the next level, along with other technologies. There is a long way to go though. We need to learn when to use it, and need to focus on usability in general, and not using Ajax just because it is cool. We do a lot of Ajax consulting, and one of the biggest things we do is get people away from the question "so I want you to build an Ajax application". Cheers, Dion

Moby, Ajax is being hyped a lot at the moment, that is very true. It is also true that building a very rich Ajax application on top of XHR isn't easy. However, one of the great things coming out of the attention, is that browsers are listening and adding support for apis such as "offline storage" which we have been wanting forever. Also, a lot of quality toolkits are out there now (Dojo, Zimbra, Prototype, ...) and they are doing the hard work of abstracting out the evil browser differences. Unfortunely, a recent poll on ajaxian.com showed that most people are not using these frameworks. What you get with Ajax is reach and open standards. That is why I am excited about its potential, even though we are seeing some abuse, the hype curve is nuts. Cheers, Dion

Hi, My name is Dion Almaer, and I run a site called ajaxian.com which focuses on news, resources, and all things Ajax. We also have a podcast called Audible Ajax. Let us know if there is anything that you would like to see covered, and if there is anything cool in the Ajax world that we have missed. Cheers, Dion

Hi, My name is Dion Almaer, and I run a site called ajaxian.com which focuses on news, resources, and all things Ajax. We also have a podcast called Audible Ajax. Let us know if there is anything that you would like to see covered, and if there is anything cool in the Ajax world that we have missed. Cheers, Dion

Accessibility takes a back seat to flashiness so far. A lot of "gee-whiz" ajax applications are great eye candy and the surprising responsiveness can make you wonder if it's just a web page or something more. I think that most of what we're seeing now doesn't get past that stage.

I follow Ajaxian, and even though it doesn't cover accessibility directly, I find that the developers they link to do get in to these issues sometimes. It's a new field, so you have to dig deeper to find people doing apps that are more than just experiments.

Degrade gracefully. Include keyboard accelerators. Always use alt text. The same rules, but there's got to be a lot of interpretation still.

MS is really lagging on AJAX and you can trust MS do to it non DOM compatible way and IE only ;-)

They are trying to bring more buzz into their .net platform. Is it me or has .net hype already vanished as well as webservice-em-all FUD from MS ?

For any AJAX adicts down there my favorite blog is :
http://www.ajaxian.com/

If we were using RiA solution instead of HTML page for applications, AJAX would not be required to implement an acceptable application ergonomy.