AJAXWorld Magazine is the pre-eminent independent vendor-neutral resource for the fastest growing new segment of the software business: entirely Web-based applications and experiences like Gmail, Google Maps, Live.com, MySpaces, and Flickr.

AJAXWorld Magazine recognizes that the next-generation user-centric Web is hurtling toward us and that it's a rich-media future in which AJAX, as the most talked about of all the Rich Internet technologies, is positioned firmly at center stage.

AJAXWorld Magazine provides developers, architects, IT managers, and corporate decision makers with comprehensive information and insight into the biggest paradigm shift in website design, development, and deployment since the invention of the World Wide Web fifteen years ago.

Working with the Google AJAX Feed API
Simplifying a historical complexity
by Chris Schalk

Growth of Web Applications in the U.S.
Status and implications for the tech industry
by Michael Mace

AJAX Reporting Challenges & Solutions with Adobe Flex
Bringing together JavaScript, Flash Player, and Web Services
by Yakov Fain

Betting on Java for AJAX
Bringing established Java technologies to the real-time Web
by Brian Albers

Bringing AJAX into the Enterprise
New challenges, new solutions
By Adam Breindel

Download AJAXWorld Magazine, November 2007

PDF format, 3.5MB.

From The Publisher
AJAX: Where Next? By Jeremy Geelan

Is AJAX fit to serve as spear carrier for next-generation Web technology? That question, asked by the San Diego Business Journal in March 2007, was answered by the sheer scale of the last two AJAXWorld Conference & Expos, in March (New York) and September (Santa Clara). The undisputed answer is “Yes!”

So many companies have jumped aboard the AJAX train that when we wanted to do an informal survey the other day on upcoming Web and Internet technology trends, I was able to quickly compile a list of 800 different companies that are leaving the station.

AJAX is moving toward the enterprise. Google, the company that helped light the AJAX wildfire in the first place by using it in Google Maps and Gmail, has since then released a paid version of its Web-based applications for small businesses, Google Apps Premier Edition, which relies on AJAX.

Beyond AJAX

Gmail was released on April 1, 2004, nearly a whole year before Jesse James Garrett even coined the term “AJAX.” Some are already saying that Comet is the next step beyond AJAX. Chester Millisock, for example, wrote recently:

“It took ten months after the release of Gmail for AJAX to become a common technology. It took ten months for others to discover what Google was doing and to learn how to implement it themselves. It took ten months to come to the point where the programmer’s brain said, “This Web app communicates with the server without refreshing the page. I like that!”

The same thing is happening all over again. Except in a short while the programmer’s brain will become trained to say, “This Web app has a large amount of data that it wants to send to me. The server is continuously sending data to my browser, so it’s there immediately when I ask for it. I like that!”

Using a Comet approach implies keeping a connection open between the server and each client. This allows for a “push” style of notification, whereby the server can inform the client of events asynchronously rather than wait for the client to poll for updates at regular intervals.

Backbase, a company specializing in rich Internet applications, published as long ago as in 2005 a whitepaper entitled “AJAX and Beyond” to explain their Backbase Presentation Client, designed to interact with their Presentation Server.

And some Microsoft developers, while acknowledging that AJAX is a very important piece of the puzzle, and solves many of the problems faced when creating responsive Web user interfaces, claim that AJAX isn’t really asynchronous at all when it comes to HTTP requests. (“An AJAX Web request is a synchronous Web request just like any other,” writes Brendan Tompkins, for example. “All AJAX solutions really are doing is using the browser’s built-in threading – via JavaScript – to make multiple Web requests for you, and then updating the page when the server responds.”) Tompkins’ notion of “Beyond AJAX” is to use what he calls “real-life honest to goodness asynchronous method invocation on the server.”

Securing AJAX

Before we worry about Beyond AJAX, though, there are many developers (and companies) who believe we should first worry about securing the AJAX apps we currently have. Two pioneers of better AJAX security, Billy Hoffman and Bryan Sullivan, have even developed a groundbreaking one-day “Bootcamp” that will be premiered at AJAXWorld 2008 East in New York City (March 18–20, 2008).

Among other innovations, Hoffman and Sullivan have a whole new never-before-seen AJAX application that AJAX Security Bootcamp attendees will get to hack against, before using the app just attacked as a catalyst to lead the discussion about how to secure AJAX applications. “The audience will have probably missed some vulnerabilities in the application they just hacked and Bryan and I will use that to illustrate how hard AJAX can be to QA and how to properly perform QA tests,” Hoffman tells AJAXWorld Magazine.

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AJAXWorld Magazine is our bimonthly look at the world of Rich Internet Applications and Next-Generation Web techniques.

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