Ajax

The days when Web pages were static collections of text and graphics are long past. But as the Web matures, there’s a fierce competition over which technology will propel it into a medium for rich, interactive applications.

On one side of the battle lines is the original Web page description technology called HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language. Over the years, its abilities were augmented first with JavaScript, a basic programming language, and later a JavaScript-on-steroids technology called Ajax.

On the other side is Adobe Systems’ Flash, which got its start as a method for graphic animations. It’s grown into a much more powerful programming foundation over the years and has been joined more recently by a competitor: Microsoft’s Silverlight.

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 San Francisco-Google announced a new set of APIs to make AJAX development faster and easier.

At its Google I/O developer conference here May 28, Google showed off its Google AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Libraries API, which exists to make AJAX applications that use popular frameworks such as Prototype, Script.aculo.us, jQuery, Dojo and MooTools faster and easier for developers, said Dion Almaer, a Google engineer who worked on the technology.

“When you take a look at the effort that it takes to set up work that should be simple, such as caching shared JavaScript libraries, you quickly realize that the Web could be faster than it currently is,” Almaer said. “The AJAX Libraries API is an attempt to make Web applications faster for developers in simple ways: Developers won’t have to worry about getting caching set up correctly, as we will do that for you; if another application uses the same library [much more likely], then there is a much better chance that it will be already caching on the user’s machine; and the network and bandwidth of the user’s systems will not be taxed.”

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