We are using software applications more than ever before. As the demand for new capabilities and functions grows, companies strive to provide an adequate response to business needs. The rate of application evolution places an ever-larger burden on the shoulders of software producers, v...

The story of software development in the last few years has been driven by the need to provide a good user experience without installation issues and update woes. For some people that has meant building "smart client" applications, as promoted by Microsoft. For others, that has meant b...

The Web 2.0 phenomenon of the last couple years – which has been picking up steam recently – is largely dependent on AJAX. This concept is beneficial to both the developer and user, as it makes programming Web applications more fun while enhancing the user experience. As a develope...

With the growing popularity of consumer Web sites such as Google Maps, YouTube, and Flickr, the consumer sector is aggressively endorsing Web 2.0 technologies. Increasingly, enterprises are recognizing the business value of the Web platform over the high cost of ownership and limited r...

Aptana Jaxer is a new open source application server built especially for AJAX application development in JavaScript. To say that "Jaxer lets you do JavaScript on the server-side" would be accurate, but an understatement. The core concept of Jaxer is that it provides a parity of enviro...

Load time configuration is the process where a JavaScript application configures itself as it is being loaded. This pattern is most commonly found in libraries in which they configure themselves at load time to be optimized for a particular browser. Load time configuration is also know...

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...

Each day as an AJAX developer seems to bring another helpful revelation: a new tool, a new gadget, a new way to reinvent the browser. But even when I'm confronted with a breakthrough as big as Firebug - the brilliant debugging tool for Firefox - in the back of my mind I'm reminded that...

Hard-nosed executives recognize that there are costs associated with any benefit. To convince today's upper-level decision makers to approve strategic investments, they need to hear more than phrases like 'essential to the business,' 'the results are too unpredictable,' and 'yields int...

Mobile AJAX is the extension of AJAX principles to the mobile environment, which includes other constrained devices such as gaming consoles or set-top boxes featuring Web browsers. While technologically the same thing, Mobile AJAX is looked at as a special case of AJAX, as it deals wit...