Development > AJAX > All

A few years ago, self-proclaimed non-developer Kevin Smith worked for a software company that tried to build a project tracking tool using Microsoft .Net. Some 15 developers spent a year with little success. "After burning though a million dollars and still without a product, the company called it quits," says Smith, now managing partner of NextWave Performance, a consultancy in Denver, Colo.

Concentrating on rich Internet applications, Zend Technologies is backing Adobe's Action Message Format (AMF) in Zend Framework 1.7.

JavaFX, Sun Microsystems' entrant in the rich Internet application (RIA) space, is nearly ready for prime time and, by the way, the company is making money off of Java, company officials said Monday afternoon at the Adobe Max 2008 conference in San Francisco.

Aptana last week announced the release of Aptana Jaxer 1.0 and the introduction of Jaxer Pro, both of which are "AJAX servers" that let developers build Web applications using JavaScript, DOM, CSS, and HTML.

One thing that the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) development community has aplenty is choice. Want a free, open source AJAX framework? We have (alphabetically) Dojo, Ext, Google Web Toolkit, jQuery, MooTools, OpenRico, Prototype, Scriptaculous, and the Yahoo User Interface Library, and frankly they're all pretty good. There are hundreds more, but unfortunately I can't keep up with them all.

The OpenAjax Alliance plans in 2009 to finish off two interoperability technologies for AJAX developers, IBM officials said at the AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo on Monday.

Dissatisfied with the Web development tools already available, researchers at the newly formed Developer Tools Lab at Mozilla Labs intend to find better options.

Are you looking for an open source, Web-based e-mail and groupware suite with its own development framework, Ajax interface, more than 50 applications, an active developer community, and millions of end users all over the world? The Horde communication and collaboration suite may not be as well known as the big name commercial offerings, but according to lead developer and release manager Jan Schneider it has just as much to offer, and more.

You don't have to be a programmer to be a mobile innovator. All you need to do is open your eyes to the fact that a smart phone or QWERTY handset is a personal computer, sans legacy baggage. In the future, user-facing computers will have more in common with the high-end mobile devices of today than with the eight-core desktops and quad-core notebooks of 2009.

The relentless drive to control every part of the world from a browser-based widget is now turning on itself. Not only are all of our desktop applications being replaced with HTML, but the act of creating a Web application itself has moved to the Web. The new platform from Coghead lets anyone build Web applications by pointing and clicking at another Web application. The only time you need to edit ASCII is when you're putting labels on columns and widgets.

The power of Web-based applications continues to burgeon as they take on the art of application building itself. In a number of online tools, the old compile-link-deploy loop disappears, and editing a Web application becomes as simple as editing a comment for Slashdot. (Notice I used the word "edit," not "program.") Just click a few times in the browser and your application is up and running.