'Enough with the new words already.' That was how Sean Voisen recently ended a discussion about the burgeoning technology lexicon, which he thinks can only be explained as 'a ploy to keep Merriam-Webster in business.' Voisen, who designs and builds Rich Internet Applications, web appli...

Join Scott Guthrie as he discusses Microsoft’s commitment to web standards development, Rich Internet Applications and how Microsoft is contributing to help move the web forward. Join Adobe’s Kevin Lynch as he demonstrates how Flash and HTML come together to make the most engaging,...

"My mission has always been to bring excellence to the field of user interface engineering," says Bill Scott, Director of User Interface Engineering at Netflix, in this Exclusive Q&A with SYS-CON's AJAX & RIA Journal in the run-up to his session on October 20 at AJAX World RIA Conferen...

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys li...

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, code...

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning: 'Because they can only give you answers.' Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of t...

Ever since Jesse James Garrett coined the term AJAX to describe the collection of existing technologies that allow increased responsiveness and interactivity of webpages, its adoption has been embraced across the Web. But have designers and developers gone overboard? Is everything a na...

Follow along and implement the real-time streaming AJAX system in Figure 1 using two different AJAX toolkits and the OpenAjax Hub. We don't have to build the above system from scratch, and can instead leverage readily available, reusable AJAX parts to get the job done quickly; the arch...

'The Java backlash,' writes Bruce Eckel, 'has been building up steam, and we're starting to see some fundamental shifts because of it.' Java has been around for 10 years yet applets are not the primary way that we interact with the web. Applets are not ubiquitous, and everyone got exci...

The significance of blogging is not the word 'blog' whether used as a verb or a noun, but its role as a harbinger of the game-changing Web-as-platform revolution. In particular, the migration of blogging from the individual toward the enterprise...

It has come a long, long way since February 2005 when Jesse James Garrett coined the now universally used term for it: the rise and rise of 'AJAX' has been meticulously reflected in the pages of SYS-CON Media's magazines and web sites. We take an end-of-year look at its first 22 months...

Six month ago, Alex Iskold switched from J2EE Grid Computing to Web 2.0, JavaScript and Firefox extension development. He has been writing in Web 2.0 Journal about his experiences - see 'From J2EE to JavaScript.' This is the next instalment...

Now that the web is well on its way to becoming more responsive, smoother and reliable - and correspondingly more enjoyable to work with - AJAXWorld Magazine stops up and tries to 'freeze-frame' the moment. We take a look at the question that is presently on the mind of hundreds and th...

In a projection that comes on the heels of an AJAXWorld discussion of burgeoning security issues currently plaguing the AJAX model, a recent SitePoint and Ektron survey of Web professionals has suggested AJAX will soon surpass Flash as the predominant Web development model of choice.

With just four days to go before the start of AJAXWorld 2006, which begins with a pre-conference AJAX University Bootcamp on October 2 followed by two full days of Conference & Expo on October 3-4, it is looking increasingly likely that every single ticket will be sold. As of this writ...

Japan knows web 2.0 - probably better than us in US. But very few people in Japan have heard of or paid attention to MySpace. Their attention is on Mixi, the biggest social networking site in Japan.

According to its founding light David Heinemeier Hansson, Ruby on Rails (RoR) is about 'taking the pain away and making you happy.' Hansson says he knowingly advises people, before they try Rails, to cut their teeth in web-development on the mainstream offerings first. 'Once you've tri...

Steve Ballmer, who after all is a 'mere' executive, not a founder like the rest of them, comes in at number fifteen in the newly-released Forbes 400 Richest Americans list. The list confirms the hugely dominant role played by technology in creating billionaires in the USA: no fewer tha...

As the result of his visit last week to Japan to speak at the 2006 ProWise Power Forum in Tokyo, Coach Wei - Chairman and CTO of Nexaweb - discovered that in Japan they have been adopting 'Web 2.0' technologies for some incredibly complex and mission critical systems with great success...

Just fifteen years after Tim (now Sir Tim) Berners-Lee made public a little project he called the World Wide Web, something new is happening. And it involves, if not AJAX, then some kind of similar approach: this four-letter word, and the approach it crystallizes, has catalyzed a profo...

The editors of Java Developer's Journal are in a unique position when it comes to Java development. All are active coders in their 'day jobs,' and they have the good fortune in getting a heads up on many of the latest and greatest software releases. They were asked to nominate three pr...

Tightly defined, AJAX simply describes a technology that transports information to and from the browser and not how that information is displayed. To purists, AJAX is about communicating asynchronously from the browser using JavaScript and XML, nothing more. To others, through their ex...

In most cases I'm a patient and tolerant person. Once you get to know me, I'm easy to get along with, occasionally complex, but not very often. My patience and tolerance has pretty much gone out the window in the last week or so. It all stems from two technologies: Ruby On Rails (RoR) ...

Ajax(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) means many things to many people. However, one thing is certain: To users it implies a higher level of functionality and an improved experience. To the developer, another certainty follows: More work. The only question is how much work and to what ...

After spending the last 12-18 months involved in a lot of 'Web 2.0' conversations and reading a lot of 'Web 2.0' materials, I am confused. Starting from some people's question about whether Web 2.0 exists, whether/how Web 2.0 stories such as MySpace/Google/YouTube/Flickr are meaningful...

I have been discussing the potential implications of what is being termed - by Microsoft Technical Fellow, Dr. Gary Flake - the Internet Singularity. The core of this concept is that the Internet and physical worlds will become more and more tightly coupled. This is already happening a...

Pageview counts are as susceptible as hit counts to site design decisions that have nothing to do with actual usage. That, argues Evan Williams, is part of the reason MySpace drives such an amazing number of pageviews: it's because their site design is so terrible. So what's a better m...

Pattern: Concurrent Document Loader Problem: Need to load multiple documents and can't proceed until all of them are loaded Example: Load configuration files for an AJAX application

Like so many of the ideas that tumble out of the Googleplex into the public domain, Google Trends is irresistible. Jeremy Geelan puts the application, newly taken out of beta and now available to all cyberspace from the Google main page, through its paces by taking it out for a giddy s...

Not since the formation of NATO in 1945 have four letters been combined to such effect, nor has any 4-letter acronym since then been the subject of such hyperbole. (Quod erat demonstrandum.)

In this series of interviews with some of the movers and shakers behind the OpenAJAX initiative, SYS-CON West Coast Bureau Chief Roger Strukhoff speaks with IBM's David Boloker, Oracle's Ted Farrell, Zimbra's Scott Dietzen, Laszlo's David Temkin, Novell's former CTO Charlie Ungashick, ...

Hard on the heels of Google's acquisition of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) start-up Upstartle LLC and its Writely.com beta word processor a couple of weeks ago, Michael Robertson - who started Linspire, née Lindows, the Linux operating system company that won a $20M settlement out of M...

'Most people really like the embedded Google Maps, but don't know how easy it is to add them to any page,' writes Joshua Siler of Exploration Age and Kinetic Theory, Inc. In this How-To Guide he shows how it's done. Says Siler: 'With a little bit of HTML knowledge, anyone can quickly h...

If you want to learn AJAX you should probably buy a few books, buy an AJAX IDE, and go to a few training classes. But first, why not mingle with people that already know it, by visiting the very latest and fastest-growing AJAX website, http://ajax.sys-con.com - it's where the prime mov...

I try not to write too much about technical topics on this blog but the story of AJAX and related developments in the rich internet application (RIA) space has been an incredible story in 2005. For example, AJAX was only a term coined in February with publication of the now-famous and ...

Recently, a number of Web sites have begun to raise some eyebrows within the developer community. What's unique about these sites is that they behave more like a desktop application than a Web application. As you interact with them, they quickly display an endless amount of information...

'We've seen the Web moving from a publishing paradigm to an e-business paradigm to an AJAX paradigm.' That is the considered verdict of IBM Software Group's CTO of Emerging Internet Technologies, David Boloker. And he's right: AJAX is here, it's growing, and it's (potentially) the bigg...

This is traditionally the time of year for SYS-CON Media's round-up of i-Technology predictions from around the Web, and this year's harvest of thoughts and viewpoints is more varied than ever. 2006 promises to be a vintage year for software development, according to SYS-CON's globe-sp...

Paolo Massa is Web-famous for predicting AJAX Office would become a reality within a year. Now he considers the Sun-Google announcement and what it might mean for the prospects of OpenOffice and Google coming preinstalled on the PCs of the world.

The publicity that AJAX grabbed over the last half a year is based on closing the gap between the Web applications and the desktop applications, combining the 'reach' and 'rich.' At the same time, the gap between the technological level of AJAX and what corporate developers expect in t...