Ajax, you're my hero

I am talking about Ajax the programming language not Ajax the king of Salamis as you were probably expecting.

I have been programming with web languages for about nine years now. I always have appriciated dynamic functions on the web. "The more real-time the better", I always say. So when AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) came along I got really excited. "How did they do that?" I was in web pages that could drag-and-drop content and update information without refreshing the whole page. Oh, how I wish I could watch my Fantasy Football stats change with hearing the rythmatic "click... click..." of traditional Javascript "F5-ing" the page on my behalf.

So now you can have all kinds of individually functioning web parts (portlets, modules, applets, etc.) on one page and not have to refresh the site. This is demonstrated in Google's personalized home page, Gmail, and Google Calendar. Beyond the Google world other cool tools are coming into view. You can host your own Ajax Portal using Myiosoft's Ajax Portal. Microsoft can't be left out but it would appear that even MSN and Windows departments are at war over a better portal with Start.com and Live.com respectively.

Tools like AjaxWrite are working to bring MS Word clones to the web (needs FireFox to run). If you are lucky enough to have a friend on the inside you can join the inner circle of orkut. Zillow is waiting for buyers and sellers of real estate.

While WikiUpload is based on Ajax that is not what makes it so cool. The special thing about WikiUpload is that they provide you with 5 GB of free, hello, FREE private and public web storage space. Not only that but they allow you to link to your files here from other sites or use RSS feeds to track them.

So flavor of the month is Ajax. I can't see past this horizon but in the world of programming nothing is top dog forever.