Ajax the way to go?

[David]

I've been reading a lot about Ajax recently. Not really a new technology, just a combination of existing ones. See here (http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php) for more information and additional background here (http://www.theserverside.net/news/thread.tss?thread_id=32688). It's the sort of stuff that Google is using for various beta services at the moment.

I can't help feeling that it is all too complicated for normal mortals but I could be wrong.

[francis]

Ah, the infamous XMLHTTPRequest appears again! People are getting very excited about this, and I can kind of see why. Basically, if I'm right, you can pull updated content/data into a page without having to refresh it. It's kind analgous to the way Flash works - you see one container movie and other movie clips within in that are loaded and refreshed without having to make a full trip to the server to refresh the page. It does have a lot of potential and is currently the bell and whistle of choice! The other one that is slowly being used more is Ruby (http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/20020101.html).