AJAX is the Word

I'm late to this. AJAX (courtesy of Microsoft, and see those guys at Adaptive Path) might be the thing that finally kills off desktop applications once and for all. The time we spend building setup programs, planning updates that don't do unplanned carnage, and duplicating things when we need both a Windows and web app is astounding.

It's interesting to see how Microsoft, the inventor of XmlHttpRequest, made this possible and then left it out there for others to run with. Now, because of the bewildering flavors of and platforms for AJAX—that is, a lack of a standardized approach—Microsoft may yet wrest control of this from the masses with ASP.NET 2.0 and Atlas. And criticism like this is going to help Microsoft take some of these people by surprise, because they don't get what they think they get. Again.

We can dink with Javascript calls to the server and sew together script.aculo.us and AJAX.NET or DOJO or, man, you name your cobbled together toolset. But this is like version 0.53871 of Web 2.0. We're soon going to look back on this as we do on Windows API programming. A standard way of coding this on the server side is needed. Maybe Microsoft will have the answer, but I shudder to think of how horrid the Javascript generated by Atlas is going to be.