The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

'Enough with the new words already.' That was how Sean Voisen recently ended a discussion about the burgeoning technology lexicon, which he thinks can only be explained as 'a ploy to keep Merriam-Webster in business.' Voisen, who designs and builds Rich Internet Applications, web applications, data visualizations and what he calls 'other fun pieces of Internet-enabled software' for a living, is not a fan of 'RIA' as a term.

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning: 'Because they can only give you answers.' Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that, readers can themselves infer: where is AJAX headed next?

Ever since Jesse James Garrett coined the term AJAX to describe the collection of existing technologies that allow increased responsiveness and interactivity of webpages, its adoption has been embraced across the Web. But have designers and developers gone overboard? Is everything a nail to be pounded with the AJAX hammer? Some of the fundamental technologies that AJAX is based on, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, can sometimes offer simpler, more elegant solutions that are better suited to certain user experiences.

Follow along and implement the real-time streaming AJAX system in Figure 1 using two different AJAX toolkits and the OpenAjax Hub. We don't have to build the above system from scratch, and can instead leverage readily available, reusable AJAX parts to get the job done quickly; the architectural strategy is to use AJAX pieces and parts that can work together. At the core of the system in Figure 2 is the OpenAjax Hub (see the OpenAjax Hub for Interop sidebar). We'll use the OAA Hub as a central publish/subscribe bus to which we can publish the live stock data so that the data grid and the future visual controls and functions can listen for those events and messages.

'The Java backlash,' writes Bruce Eckel, 'has been building up steam, and we're starting to see some fundamental shifts because of it.' Java has been around for 10 years yet applets are not the primary way that we interact with the web. Applets are not ubiquitous, and everyone got excited about AJAX instead.

The significance of blogging is not the word 'blog' whether used as a verb or a noun, but its role as a harbinger of the game-changing Web-as-platform revolution. In particular, the migration of blogging from the individual toward the enterprise...

It has come a long, long way since February 2005 when Jesse James Garrett coined the now universally used term for it: the rise and rise of 'AJAX' has been meticulously reflected in the pages of SYS-CON Media's magazines and web sites. We take an end-of-year look at its first 22 months.

Six month ago, Alex Iskold switched from J2EE Grid Computing to Web 2.0, JavaScript and Firefox extension development. He has been writing in Web 2.0 Journal about his experiences - see 'From J2EE to JavaScript.' This is the next instalment...

Now that the web is well on its way to becoming more responsive, smoother and reliable - and correspondingly more enjoyable to work with - AJAXWorld Magazine stops up and tries to 'freeze-frame' the moment. We take a look at the question that is presently on the mind of hundreds and thousands of software developers, architects, IT managers, and CXOs alike: 'What's So Special About AJAX?'

In a projection that comes on the heels of an AJAXWorld discussion of burgeoning security issues currently plaguing the AJAX model, a recent SitePoint and Ektron survey of Web professionals has suggested AJAX will soon surpass Flash as the predominant Web development model of choice.

With just four days to go before the start of AJAXWorld 2006, which begins with a pre-conference AJAX University Bootcamp on October 2 followed by two full days of Conference & Expo on October 3-4, it is looking increasingly likely that every single ticket will be sold. As of this writing there is room for just 35 more attendees ...

Japan knows web 2.0 - probably better than us in US. But very few people in Japan have heard of or paid attention to MySpace. Their attention is on Mixi, the biggest social networking site in Japan.

According to its founding light David Heinemeier Hansson, Ruby on Rails (RoR) is about 'taking the pain away and making you happy.' Hansson says he knowingly advises people, before they try Rails, to cut their teeth in web-development on the mainstream offerings first. 'Once you've tried developing a substantial application in Java or PHP or C# or whatever,' he says, 'the difference in Rails will be readily apparent. You gotta feel the hurt before you can appreciate the cure.'

Steve Ballmer, who after all is a 'mere' executive, not a founder like the rest of them, comes in at number fifteen in the newly-released Forbes 400 Richest Americans list. The list confirms the hugely dominant role played by technology in creating billionaires in the USA: no fewer than seven out of the fifteen richest Americans derived their personal wealth from technology.

As the result of his visit last week to Japan to speak at the 2006 ProWise Power Forum in Tokyo, Coach Wei - Chairman and CTO of Nexaweb - discovered that in Japan they have been adopting 'Web 2.0' technologies for some incredibly complex and mission critical systems with great success: financial trading, current exchange, project management, insurance, and power/electricity management, etc.

Just fifteen years after Tim (now Sir Tim) Berners-Lee made public a little project he called the World Wide Web, something new is happening. And it involves, if not AJAX, then some kind of similar approach: this four-letter word, and the approach it crystallizes, has catalyzed a profound transformation in the way that users and businesses alike are going to be using the Web.

The editors of Java Developer's Journal are in a unique position when it comes to Java development. All are active coders in their 'day jobs,' and they have the good fortune in getting a heads up on many of the latest and greatest software releases. They were asked to nominate three products from the last 12 months that they felt had not only made a major impact on their own development, but also on the Java community as a whole.

Tightly defined, AJAX simply describes a technology that transports information to and from the browser and not how that information is displayed. To purists, AJAX is about communicating asynchronously from the browser using JavaScript and XML, nothing more. To others, through their experiences with Google Maps and Yahoo!'s new e-mail offering, AJAX represents a desktop-like GUI that leverages the pre-existing HTML, DHTML, and vector-based rendering capabilities of the browser. Either way, 'AJAX' is a lot catchier than 'DHVAJAX.' Accordingly, it's likely that developers will continue to use it for a broad spectrum of uses. So, it's important to understand the 'quantum states' the term has taken on.

In most cases I'm a patient and tolerant person. Once you get to know me, I'm easy to get along with, occasionally complex, but not very often. My patience and tolerance has pretty much gone out the window in the last week or so. It all stems from two technologies: Ruby On Rails (RoR) and AJAX.

Ajax(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) means many things to many people. However, one thing is certain: To users it implies a higher level of functionality and an improved experience. To the developer, another certainty follows: More work. The only question is how much work and to what end.

After spending the last 12-18 months involved in a lot of 'Web 2.0' conversations and reading a lot of 'Web 2.0' materials, I am confused. Starting from some people's question about whether Web 2.0 exists, whether/how Web 2.0 stories such as MySpace/G oogle/YouTube/Flickr are meaningful to enterprises, to the most recent comments from Sir Tim Berners-Lee about Web 2.0 being just 'a piece of jargon' labelling a set of old technologies - I think the world is a little confused too.

I have been discussing the potential implications of what is being termed - by Microsoft Technical Fellow, Dr. Gary Flake - the Internet Singularity. The core of this concept is that the Internet and physical worlds will become more and more tightly coupled. This is already happening as the world around us gets 'instrumented.'

Pageview counts are as susceptible as hit counts to site design decisions that have nothing to do with actual usage. That, argues Evan Williams, is part of the reason MySpace drives such an amazing number of pageviews: it's because their site design is so terrible. So what's a better measurement?

Pattern: Concurrent Document Loader Problem: Need to load multiple documents and can't proceed until all of them are loaded Example: Load configuration files for an AJAX application

Like so many of the ideas that tumble out of the Googleplex into the public domain, Google Trends is irresistible. Jeremy Geelan puts the application, newly taken out of beta and now available to all cyberspace from the Google main page, through its paces by taking it out for a giddy spin around the i-Technology world. The results are surprising...

Not since the formation of NATO in 1945 have four letters been combined to such effect, nor has any 4-letter acronym since then been the subject of such hyperbole. (Quod erat demonstrandum.)

In this series of interviews with some of the movers and shakers behind the OpenAJAX initiative, SYS-CON West Coast Bureau Chief Roger Strukhoff speaks with IBM's David Boloker, Oracle's Ted Farrell, Zimbra's Scott Dietzen, Laszlo's David Temkin, Novell's former CTO Charlie Ungashick, and the Eclipse Foundation's Mike Milinkovich.

Hard on the heels of Google's acquisition of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) start-up Upstartle LLC and its Writely.com beta word processor a couple of weeks ago, Michael Robertson - who started Linspire, née Lindows, the Linux operating system company that won a $20M settlement out of Microsoft after Microsoft sued it for trademark infringement - has just unveiled a thing called ajaxWrite - his idea of a software-as-service alternative to Microsoft's vaunted cash-cow Office software.

'Most people really like the embedded Google Maps, but don't know how easy it is to add them to any page,' writes Joshua Siler of Exploration Age and Kinetic Theory, Inc. In this How-To Guide he shows how it's done. Says Siler: 'With a little bit of HTML knowledge, anyone can quickly have a map up and running in just a few minutes.'

If you want to learn AJAX you should probably buy a few books, buy an AJAX IDE, and go to a few training classes. But first, why not mingle with people that already know it, by visiting the very latest and fastest-growing AJAX website, http://ajax.sys-con.com - it's where the prime movers of AJAX come to learn who's doing what in AJAX, why, when, how and with whom.

I try not to write too much about technical topics on this blog but the story of AJAX and related developments in the rich internet application (RIA) space has been an incredible story in 2005. For example, AJAX was only a term coined in February with publication of the now-famous and seminal paper on the topic by Jesse James Garret of Adaptive Path. Since then, it has practically become a household word and a central plank in the Web 2.0 story.

Recently, a number of Web sites have begun to raise some eyebrows within the developer community. What's unique about these sites is that they behave more like a desktop application than a Web application. As you interact with them, they quickly display an endless amount of information to your browser without reloading the page. At the Google Maps site for example (ht tp://maps.google.com/), you can click on the map, zoom in, zoom out, and move around as much as you like. Your browser continues to be fed with data from the server, yet your browser doesn't have to refresh. They're not using applets, or anything like Flash, so how are they doing it? Introducing Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, also known as Ajax. To properly describe what Ajax is, it's easiest to contrast it with what it's not. For most Web sites, interaction with a Web server is simplex communication - like talking to your buddy on a walkie-talkie. You speak while he receives, and vice versa, but never at the same time. For a Web user, when he or she fills out an online form and then clicks the submit button, the entire page is posted to the Web server and the user must wait for the server to receive the request. When the server finishes processing the request, it sends the processed content back. Only then does the user's page finally refresh (see Figure 1). Ajax is an attempt to alleviate this choppy sequence of events. When the user is at an Ajax Web site the browser can call the Web server asynchronously, behind the scenes - without posting the entire page.

'We've seen the Web moving from a publishing paradigm to an e-business paradigm to an AJAX paradigm.' That is the considered verdict of IBM Software Group's CTO of Emerging Internet Technologies, David Boloker. And he's right: AJAX is here, it's growing, and it's (potentially) the biggest thing to hit the i-Technology world since Java.

This is traditionally the time of year for SYS-CON Media's round-up of i-Technology predictions from around the Web, and this year's harvest of thoughts and viewpoints is more varied than ever. 2006 promises to be a vintage year for software development, according to SYS-CON's globe-spanning network of software development activists, evangelists, executives and gurus - including David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails.

Paolo Massa is Web-famous for predicting AJAX Office would become a reality within a year. Now he considers the Sun-Google announcement and what it might mean for the prospects of OpenOffice and Google coming preinstalled on the PCs of the world.

The publicity that AJAX grabbed over the last half a year is based on closing the gap between the Web applications and the desktop applications, combining the 'reach' and 'rich.' At the same time, the gap between the technological level of AJAX and what corporate developers expect in their modern arsenal is really astonishing. After all, AJAX is neither a tool nor a platform. There is no AJAX standards committee or community process in place. While software vendors are crafting proprietary development platforms on top of AJAX - which pretty much means 'from scratch' - early adopters of AJAX are left on their own.

'Though it's been around for a while, AJAX is now a hot topic in the application developer community because it brings cross-platform rich user interfaces to web applications without having to use products like Microsoft .NET or Macromedia,' said Steve Benfield as he announced that his September 27 session at the Austin Java User's Group will be called 'Injecting Life into Boring Web Applications with AJAX.' Benfield plans, he says, to explain what all the AJAX fuss is about, dispel some myths and advise how best to take advantage of the trend.