Is AJAX The Way Out?

Is there a way out of our lack of bandwidth and American imagination?

If there is a way, it's called AJAX.

AJAX is short for Asynchronous Java And XML. You combine programming and an expanded set of tags to create services, not just pages, which can push or pull data to mobiles as well as PC clients.

I have been looking at AJAX about a year, but most of what I have actually seen has been cute graphics -- tags that grow in size depending on how many files are attached to them, and seem to zoom-in when you roll a mouse over them.

Cute, but not revolutionary.

Still, I took two interviews today with folks who insist AJAX can become a new "presentation layer" for computing, replacing HTML, and creating new, high-value interactive services people will pay for.

What's holding things up? A lack of standards, for one thing. According to CEO Chris Erickson of ICESoft, a lot of folks are adding their own proprietary tweaks to the AJAX systems, tools, and software. It's all well-intentioned, but it greatly limits the reach of any one AJAX application.

The other problem is that AJAX, as a movement, has not yet embraced the open source ethos. Erickson, for instance, called to say he would start giving away the ICESoft Community Edition, an important tool for building AJAX applications, but for now the source remains closed.

AJAX can do a lot of important things:

• It can bring together the laptop and mobile worlds.
• It can create turn stacks of information into high-value applications.
• It can push data to users without taking a lot of bandwidth.

But it can only do these things if it has the benefits that HTML itself had. That is, it has to be standardized, the tools have to be standardized and accessible to everyone, and people need to stop worrying about how they are going to be paid until they can create something users will gladly pay for.

We haven't had that kind of spirit here since 1995. We need it again.