What is the attraction of AJAX?

AJAX enables you in a Web browser to actually have some of the same qualities of an interaction that you used to have only in a fat client setting.

How does it do that?

Well, what happens is, AJAX is actually, if you want to look at a set of standards that were [to] form a programming model, and those standards start off with DHTML and JavaScript and XML and there's Cascading Style Sheets, there's Web services, there's all of these things that are falling into this, and each and every one of these is a standard. And the use of them all together creates a toolkit. And today there are probably 200-some-odd toolkits, between closed source and open source, and each of the toolkits does things very differently. So the first thing you have to worry about is, How does it work within Firefox? How does it work within Internet Explorer? These are all different. And then, once you get beyond [that], how do I get it render effectively? Then you can start looking at, well, What are the qualities of the AJAX implementation? Can I do drag-and-drops? Can you do cut and paste, for example, from the browser and move it somewhere else? But the key thing you start looking at is, if you [look at] a great example of an AJAX application, and there are many on the Web today, [there] is one that started off with the folks from a company acquired by Yahoo called Oddpost. And the Yahoo Beta Mail actually uses Oddpost, some of the core pieces. ... There's a group of developers that did very early work on [finding] how do I get a very, very high-quality Outlook-type mail client into a browser? And they basically were acquired by Yahoo and became Beta Mail. And if you look at what goes on inside Yahoo Mail, the first thing that's so apparent to you is you have the full services of a drag-and-drop all within the browser. The second thing you start looking at is the setting that you're having is they allow you to do RSS feeds. You can look at RSS and Atom feeds. I mean, they're just one example.

Before AJAX, or theoretically before AJAX, you had Flash. Do you see Flash as a competitor, as a complementary? It just seems like it is kind of a competitive technology even if Adobe says it's not.

I was going to tell you to ask Adobe what their opinion was. Flash is yet another example of a Web-based technology, and there are reasons why customers might want to use Flash to have an environment, a full environment, and you know there are reasons why people might want to do something just purely in DHTML and JavaScript. I mean the first obvious reason is DHTML and JavaScript [are] installed on everyone else's desktop today and is immediately used, whereas Flash was a plug-in. Now, that plug-in happens to be pretty much on most people's machines.

AJAX is a technique. Is there going to be an AJAX 2.0, 3.0? Do you see an evolution of it, or is it just that this is the technique for doing something and if you get too far away from it, then it's not AJAX anymore?

Well, it's a programming paradigm, and with all programming paradigms, whether it's AJAX 2.0 or AJAX 3.0, it started off as AJAX. And it'll always be AJAX. And what you're going to do is learn, as an industry we're all going to learn nuances to do something easier or make it much more secure, the points you brought up before.