New Age Technologies

1. Kiko. A general purpose online calendar. Elegant interface and design. API coming soon.

2. Backbase’s RSS Reader. Only a demo, so you can’t add your own feeds. Still, very nice.

3. Backpack. To do list organizer and simple project management application. Includes email and mobile reminders.

4. Writely. Online word processor. A bit rough around the edges (you can’t save in MSF T Word format, for example) but still feels like a real application. Update: per Sam Schillace @ Writely, you can export in Word format (ed: sorry for missing this). Also, API and blog publishing features coming soon.

5. Amazon Zuggest. Francis Shanahan’s version of Google Suggest–but for Amazon.

6. TimeTracker. Personal time management tool.

7. Del.icio.us Director. Rich UI for managing your del.icio.us links.

8. Backbase’s Information Portal. A highly interactive aggregation page.

9. Protopage. Another twist on an information portal.

10. Periodic Table of the Elements. The next must-have for high school chemistry students?

The traditional way of passing and retrieving data from page to page requires you to click submit buttons to pass all form fields and process it. After submitting, the user will have to wait for the server’s reply and be redirected to the action page where the results are provided. With this type of traditional architecture of processing data would require much time and would result for unproductive work paradigm.

With the use of AJAX, while preparing the data to be processed, a parallel request operation is done through the javascript XMLHttpRequest object.  So, the page would request and at the same time response from the web server without reloading the page. The user will just stay on the same page and the background scripts will do the processing of sending and re retrieving request results from the server .

Learning this type of programming technique requires you to have a backgeound on the following:

1. AJAX

2. XML

3. HTML

4. CSS (optional) 

 
BUT WHY DEVELOP WEB APPLICATIONS? 

Web applications have more advantages compared to desktop applications. First, web applications could be easily deployed. Second, it has many supports and easy to develop. Lastly, Web Apps are more flexible and more portable since you can access it through any web browsers.

Although desktop applications out fits web applications in terms of user-friendlyness and richness, with the use of AJAX, it would answer all these problems and even left behind desktop applications.

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML.

AJAX is a type of programming made popular in 2005 by Google (with Google Suggest).

AJAX is not a new programming language, but a new way to use existing standards.

With AJAX you can create better, faster, and more user-friendly web applications.

AJAX is based on JavaScript and HTTP requests.

Why is it that when you type the email address of a person from your gmail account, it would automatically filter and show possible match of your request?

Why is it that when you type a keyword for the Yahoo! search engine, it would automatically suggests some relevant related data without even executing your request?

These questions would point towards the latest innovation in web programming - AJAX. I’m about to start my studies about AJAX. Wish me luck!