Ajax Web Development Tools

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1840344,00.asp

Several major software companies aim to cash in on the growing use of AJAX by delivering tools to help developers build applications that take advantage of the popular style of Web development.

Sun Microsystems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and TIBCO Software Inc. have announced plans to support or increase their support for AJAX development, and Google Inc. and others are expected to join the race with AJAX frameworks or tools of their own.

AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a development technique for building interactive Web applications using a combination of HTML, JavaScript and XMLHTTP, experts say. "AJAX is this overnight sensation that was invented almost a decade ago," said Charles Fitzgerald, general manager of the platform strategy group at Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash. "And a lot of the core functionality showed up in IE [Internet Explorer] 4 and IE 5."

"To me, AJAX is so strange because at its core it is more of an architecture than a technology," said Dion Almaer, chief technology officer at Adigio Inc., in Cambridge, Mass. "What is exciting about AJAX is purely changing apps so that instead of having a full request/response, which pulls down a full page on simple events, you can have a page that sends off minor