The Return of AJAX ?

Some relatively new Google applications have prompted renewed interest in a programming technique that is years old.Google Suggest and Google Maps gave Web users the sense they were using a desktop application instead of an Internet-based tool.

Google Suggest fills in words for suggested search terms, and typing an address into Google Maps returns a detailed map of the immediate area with the ability to pan out to state or national boundaries.

The apps were created using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), which calls from the server only the information you need for the Web browser. Rather than querying the Web server directly every time a request is made from the browser, AJAX sticks a JavaScript element between the two. This allows the browser to maintain its state while the script runs the data request to the Web server and back.

The programming style incorporates a number of open Web standards, including XHTML, XML, CSS, XMLHttpRequest, XSLT and DOM.

The promise AJAX programming brings to Web development, with its speedy and powerful processing times, has led some to speculate whether the medium could replace the need for desktop applications altogether. If a Web application can do what a desktop application does on the PC, why bother with software installs?

Sun Microsystems in the late 1990s with its "network as a computer" concept of putting software on the server is a huge leap in logic to make.But just because you can run application functionality remotely doesn't mean it's appropriate for everything, like when you're offline.