Asyncronous Javascript and XML, or ajax. It's the new buzzword for rich web content and applications in the browser ... the whole 'the network is the computer' business that Sun has been trying to get across for ages now. see Wikipedia.
Ajax is used for GMail and Live from Microsoft. It is mixture of several existing technologies to provide a much slicker, cleaner web experience for the end user (how does it help the developer? I don't know, haven't done anything that could be called ajax, need to start toying). Here is an excellent post about getting started creating ajax apps Rush's ajax for beginners. There are some cool portal sites out there like pageflakes and netvibes and companies are quickly throwing ajax apps up all over the web.
How much is hype and buzzwords? A lot, to be sure, web 2.0 is a bubble being quickly blown to mid-90's 'same idea but on the internet' proportions. We've had all these ideas before, ajax just makes it work better. It's evolution of technology and the fact that more and more people have the bandwidth to actually be able to use these things doesn't hurt, but the marketing folks dream of monetizing these types of apps is still probably just that, a dream. Hopefully we can continue to evolve the technology and get more and better experiences, but it's all about services on top of something else. And that something else is what will drive revenue, not ajax. Ajax is just another tool.
As useful as it might be, the hype might cause it to implode and then we'll be forced to make up a new word for interactivity on the web. Things like ajaxWrite that make huge promises, then fall very, very short of those promises don't help anything. Extremetech has a review here. It doesn't even appear that ajaxWrire is actually written in what is defined as ajax. See comments at slashdot here. Marketing and buzzwords might make the CEO's richer, but real engineering and coding will eventually bring better tools to more people at lower cost, no matter what it's called.
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