AJAX Who?

The AJAX World conference in New York last week clearly marked to me that we have long driven past a turning point in AJAX and are somewhere on the eastside of the Gartner hype cycle curve. There were many telltale signs: almost no vendors, no recruiters from Google, largely shallow presentations, and a sparse and low energy audience. Poor timing (sandwiched between St Patrick’s and Easter) and economic turmoil further emphasized the message that the AJAX hype has passed. (Jeremy Geelan however was chipper as always)

Yes, AJAX is no longer and I say good riddance. I hope the day will soon come when we can just talk about javascript and browser capabilities without having to resort to tacky buzzwords. We are entering the “Post-AJAX” world, which just means that the distinction between what is AJAX and what is not is not worth making anymore. This may be bad for people who run conventions, but it is generally good for everyone else, because quiet times are usually productive times. Let’s not forget that AJAX itself was born out of the lull (i.e. recession) between 2000 and 2003, when nothing much seemed to happen because people were, well, writing a lot of really good code. So, in a post-AJAX world, we might expect to see a few key things happen:

1. Consolidation of AJAX frameworks: the AJAX hype fueled the productization (usually as open source) of dozens of javascript frameworks (most of them in-house frameworks started sometime between 2000 and 2003), most of these will die off or merge into others in the coming year or two.
2. Browser improvements: the next generation of browsers already show marked improvements. These will get digested in the coming years, and at the same time, older browsers (IE 6!) will be safely flushed out of the mainstream. This glacial migration of browsers is one of the key limiting factors in web innovation.
3. Mainstreaming in the enterprise: we’ll see the results of the current general mainstreaming of things like mashups and AJAX into the enterprise (meaning internal corporate sites and premium corporate software). We’ll know when its actually happening because people will stop talking about it.
4. Maturation, Standardization, and Consolidation of RIAs: as RIA frameworks mature, there simply wont be any rational for supporting 3+ proprietary systems.
   
5. Maturation of Mashups: significant improvements will drive the mashup ecosystem. A lot of this will simply be filling in the gaps in available content.

It’s a fairly safe prediction that post-AJAX innovation will focus mainly on leveraging the resources of the "mashup ecosystem". This is the golden promise that we have been hearing about from AJAX, and that initiatives such as SMash (from OpenAjax Alliance), and Douglass Crockford's various proposals are trying to address. Not all of the pieces of the puzzle are in place yet for the browser-based mashup to become the killer application it is hyped to be, but just as DHTML needed a few years of quite for the pieces to come together into AJAX, Mashups may need the same here and now.