Ajax 2.0: Welcome to the Revolution

A bit over a year ago, Ajax became the cool technology of the moment. It allowed people to create websites which are more interactive and this allowed some pioneers to create impressive services such as GoogleMaps and GMail. It was exactly the fact that Google, the coolest company on the Internet, at that time, introduced this concept in its services that called attention to it and made it into an industry phenomenon.
Many set out to create JavaScript libraries which would enable developers to more easily use the power of Ajax in their applications and some achieved some impressive results from their efforts. As more and more people have started to rely on Ajax to build interactive websites and web applications, the limitations of these libraries have become more apparent. They are helpers, focused on getting a job done. A job which would be impossible without Ajax.
It is exactly the focus of these libraries on creating these impressive visual controls and on animation effects that has led some people, recently, to question Ajax's future since the current crop of libraries do not offer the equivalent of a full development system.
It is at this point that a major paradigm shift comes into our lives. In order to be able to create complex business applications that work within the browser we have to stop working with HTML pages which contain a few scripts, we turn to writing scripts which may contain a few HTML lines but all of it automatically generated inside the browser. This new breed of Web applications is composed of applications which have their interface 100% implemented with Ajax.
We are now moving to this stage where Web applications will be totally composed of scripts which get downloaded and executed inside the browser and thus generate the final page layout directly within the Browser. These applications represent the next step in the evolution of web application development since they empower developers to use Javascript in ways not previously possible.
The first proponent, of this philosophy in Web development, to bring something to the market was Morfik, a startup company from Australia. Morfik introduced the WebOS AppsBuilder which comes with a large framework, in 2005. This framework really helps, a lot, in the creation of complex applications since it focus not only in the obvious parts of Ajax, but also on providing a gluing infrastructure for dymanic applications.
This is the new style for serious application development with Ajax. This is Ajax 2.0, and your Web applications will never be quite the same again.