The conjunction of AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 this month with the publication of the 600-page blockbuster Real-World AJAX, the announcement by the OpenAjax Alliance of the OpenAjax Hub and OpenAjax Conformance, the release by Laszlo Systems of OpenLaszlo 4.0 and the Laszlo Webtop...all these thing coming together at once mark a significant milestone in the brief history of AJAX, rich user experiences in general, and the growing challenges and opportunities in this space as we continue to witness a tectonic shift in the way Web apps are designed and built.

We are now rapidly leaving the era where static HTML is acceptable to the users and customers of our software. The "Web page" metaphor is just no longer a compelling model for the majority of online Web applications.

Combined with the rise of badges and widgets, and the growing prevalence of what I call the "Global SOA" to give us vast landscapes of incredibly high-value Web services and Web parts, it's important to note that the use of AJAX is essential to even start exploiting these important trends. Skirting the corners of this phenomenon are also the non-trivial challenges offered up by largely abandoning the traditional model of the browser. Specifically, what happens to search engine optimization (SEO), disabled accessibility, link propagation (along with network effects), Web analytics, traditional Web user interface conventions, and more, which are all dramatically affected - often broken outright - by the AJAX Web application model?

Many of these questions will be answered, for those of you reading this issue at AJAXWorld 2007 East, at the event in New York City. Many are addressed too in Real-World AJAX, but many remain relatively unanswered in an industry struggling to deal with a major mid-industry change. The tools, processes, and technologies we've brought to bear to build Web applications are going to change a lot, as well as the skill sets. These types of rich Web applications require serious software development skills, particularly as the browser is a relatively constrained environment compared to traditional software development runtime environments like Java and .NET.

Of course, despite these issues - even because of them - it is a very exciting time to be in the AJAX business right now. One big reason is that there are few AJAX products with clear market dominance yet and the dozens and dozens of AJAX libraries and frameworks currently available offer a very diverse and compelling set of options for use as the foundation of the next great AJAX application. While the Dojo Toolkit is probably the AJAX toolkit with the largest mindshare and lots of industry interest at the present time, the big vendors such as Microsoft and their ASP.NET AJAX (a.k.a. "Atlas") show, as the first major products from big vendors make their way to market, that the story is still just beginning.

There's little doubt that we'll continue to see the AJAX market maturing and I'm looking forward to a variety of upcoming improvement such as Project Tamarin, the high-speed JavaScript engine donated by Adobe to the Mozilla project; the ongoing evolution of OpenAjax; and the 1.0 release of Dojo sometime this year; to name just a few of the exciting things that have the potential to ensure AJAX continues to grow and evolve.