Microsoft Intensifies Ajax Efforts

Ajax, a conglomeration of technologies that cover everything from presentation and object modeling to data interchange and retrieval is attracting wide attention.Microsoft thinks Ajax apps are too hard to build, and the company's Web platform team is trying to demystify Ajax with the development of an easier-to-use Ajax-style programming technology code-named "Atlas" that it's planning to bring to market during the first half of 2006. Look at Adam Bosworth talk about Ajax. A prototype of the technology is available here. Brian Goldfarb, Microsoft's product manager refuting the claim that Microsoft is unready for web 2.0, shares some inside perspectives on Ajax. He sees that there are two important things happened recently to revitalize interest in Ajax.
- First, a wider number of browsers have provided support for the technologies developers need for Ajax- style development, and
- Second, there has been a new focus and interest in delivering better user experiences for customers.
For the Web there are two challenges to this.
- The first is the limitation of application development within the browser,
- The second is development complexity.
Microsoft hopes that Atlas would help make Ajax- style development easier, and more approachable for a broader range of developers & believes that Atlas will be as good as is gets on the browser and will enable the broad masses of developers to easily take their Web applications to the next level. From a benefits perspective, Ajax enables better user experiences on the Web, which can help businesses gain a competitive advantage, providing the emotional connection that users have when they use an application, leading to brand loyalty and more. Richer experiences are able to provide big business benefits. From a technical perspective, compared to traditional web apps, the primary advantages of Ajax-style Web applications include more interactive user interfaces by executing code on the client, automatic updates without requiring the user to refresh the page, and better performance from fewer round trips to the server, among many others. Ajax-style development enables developers to optimize the user experience by gaining more control over what happens on the client versus the server. Brian makes the right observation that there is a larger focus on generally better experiences - Ajax is just a component of the story. It is about differentiating offerings, standing out from the crowd, and providing awesome experiences–and that need will drive the technology.