Exploring Ajax Runtime Offerings

The browser technologies that led to the current Ajax wave have been available since early 1999. But the programming interfaces they originally presented were very low-level and painful to work with, and the browser and JavaScript tricks that comprised Ajax could often demand more of the client machine than it had to give. With the additional memory, processor, and network bandwidth capacities that have become ubiquitous on the client machine in the last few years, Ajax has become a realistic way to develop rich user interfaces for Web applications. One effect of this is that a host of Ajax runtime frameworks has popped up that tries to present the developer with a more workable application programming model.