Years ago, Adam Bosworth coined the term DHTML - as in Dynamic HTML. Jesse James Garrett re-labeled DHTML as “AJAX” If you have not seen this clip - you should. Watch it and pay close attention to what is said, as well as what is not said. Notice that AJAX is not just about Email, or Maps, or Calendars; it is in fact about providing a rich user experience when it is needed. Everyone knows this already or at least they should.

The GWT (Google Web Toolkit) is essentially VB for AJAX. The first version is nice, but the next version will be more realistically usable. There will come a point in time when writing AJAX guts like XMLHttpRequest will be like writing Assembly code. You’ll be able to do it, but you will probably want to use a GWT-like library and some type of AJAX library aware IDE.

The browser, is a platform in and of itself. In some ways it is kind of like Windows 3.1 on top of DOS. The browser is windows and the logic and file-access is all DOS. So at some point it’s possible we’ll see a better integration between the UI and the back-end. Right now, the best tool for this is probably GWT, however, it’s not perfect and it doesn’t let you use Java 5 yet. The whole key to GWT is the compiler. It essentially translates code into separate pieces that allow you to break the app into two pieces the server side and of course the client side. (Feels like the early 90’s all over again).

The single thing that is going to make AJAX frameworks/toolkits/libraries great is when the client-side runtime is standardized. This means, at some point the framework code that runs in the client (events, rendering, code-management, et al) will need to be unified so that it won’t matter so much what the back-end is. Ideally anyways. The other added benefit of this is that you should be able to have the same experience regardless of the host platform (Operating System) and regardless of the browser. That being said, their will probably be two: one for Microsoft and one for everyone else. Which is kind of a necessary evil for Microsoft to preserve their platform. The irony of this is that as Microsoft keeps building their product pyramid and enhancing their platform, they inadvertently create a platform to compete against which is the obviously named “non-MS platform”. Oh – it has other names like “Open Source”.

Please share your thoughts.

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