Ajax Everywhere

C|net has a story today about the race companies like Sun Microsystems, IBM and Microsoft are in to include Ajax support in the development tools they provide. Since Ajax burst wide-open roughly a year ago, open-source projects like Ruby on Rails were fast to include Ajax support and standalone javascript libraries like Prototype, Scriptaculous and Moo.ajax appear faster than a person can keep track of. Now the big players are joining in the Ajax buzz by making sure their tools will put Ajax at the hands of their customers.

With everybody throwing support behind Ajax it won’t be long until Ajax goes through its Flash phase. Every Web-developing nephew around the world will toss more Ajaxified forms, doo-dads and widgets on every Web site you visit that you’ll long for the days when you could ‘skip intro’. Of course with any new technology we can expect people will use it wrong 99 out of 100 times before industry standards, best practices and plain old common sense shows up to straighten out the mess.

The growth of Ajax has given skilled Web developers the ability to enhance and improve the user-experience of browser based applications. Having tools available from established companies, along with the open-source tools, will be a good thing. Once we’ve all figured out how to best use it of course.