AMCP Tech Blog

Hey everyone. I really have a big posting lapse to make up for, and I'm starting the recovery effort now. AJAX. The word is on the lips of geeks across the U.S. Despite its rather dry acronym (Asynchronyous JavaScript And XML), AJAX has come to stand for "cool web-based applications". Some people think AJAX is the future of computing, some just think it's a passing trend, but what most of us agree with is the fact that it's cool. AJAX enables users to have all the functionality of a full-featured desktop program at their fingertips, without having to download anything. They can save data to the internet and then access it from any internet-capable machine, instead of having to print it out or store i9t on an expensive thumb drive or other storage medium. If the computer crashes and you use AJAX, you won't lose your data. You han have multiple AJAX apps open in the same browser at the same time, and since there is only one actual program open (the browser) and the AJAX apps are made of only XML and JavaScript (and thus are really fast) you can run everything without crashes and at a high speed. AJAX apps are perfect for old computers that find it hard to handle multiple programs at the same time. So those are the benefits of AJAX. The detriments? They are hard to come up with. There might be a problem making money off of an AJAX app, but advertising can solve that problem, as well as a per-user fee. It might be hard to make AJAX programs full-featured enough because of the need for speed, but I doubt it. Conclusion: AJAX is a really cool, rising technology that deserves a lot of attention. Now for the fruit of my research: my links. I've been covering AJAX for about a week and a half now, and here's my del.icio.us page with the fruit of all my research. Some of the links lead to really cool standalone AJAX apps, and some lead to more link directories. Be sure to check out eHub, Writely, and inquisitorx beta.
Here it is! See my Del.icio.us tags for AJAX.