AJAX has received a lot of hyperbole over the last year or so, with some people renaming the web to “Web 2.0” [groan] in its honour. It allows websites to present a richer, more interactive interface, breaking the “click Next” sequential, disconnected web paradigm.

Personally, I believe that – in moderation – a bit of AJAX can be a good thing (think: Goole Maps) but that there is a danger of really breaking the normal web programming model. Google has thought about this, and have some useful guidelines for AJAX applications, along with a nice AJAX toolkit, which allows you to build applications in Java which are then compiled down to JavaScript. Anything which auto-generates compliant and working JavaScript, and therefore saves me from writing the stuff by hand, has to be A Good Thing. Writing JavaScript makes me feel unclean 😉

AJAX is here to stay, though, at least for the next couple of years. Oracle have put together a series of articles on AJAX from a JSF perspective, which explain the basics of AJAX rather nicely.