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Microsoft And Eclipse: A Showdown For Ajax Leadership
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03/27/2006, By Charles Babcock
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Web users are getting spoiled. Once they experience the Ajax-powered speed and interactivity of apps on Google or Flickr, click-and-wait Web interfaces won't cut it. Spurred by growing business interest, Microsoft and backers of Eclipse, the open source programmer's workbench, last week stepped up efforts to create Ajax-friendly tools for building interactive Web applications.
Unlike the mature technical standards for server-side software, tools and technologies for Web development are changing rapidly. Ajax is the symbol of emerging Web development, combining JavaScript and XML so that, instead of requiring round trips to a server each time a user wants new data, a browser's cache pre-fetches the information that might appear next. This leads to much faster interaction, with Google Maps among the star examples.
And last month, IBM teamed with Google, Laszlo Systems, Mozilla, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, and Yahoo to establish the Ajax Toolkit Framework, an open source project to build an Eclipse-based software system that makes it easier to use Ajax tools inside Eclipse. Ajax isn't easy to use. Google learned that as it tried to compose Google Maps and found the shadows under markers on the maps, or the driving lines for directions between two points, displayed differently depending on the browser used. "Google put a lot of effort into creating toolkits so we wouldn't have to worry about these details," says Bret Taylor, product manager for Google's developer products. In effect, Eclipse, with the help of heavyweights like Google, is trying to duplicate that effort to make Ajax easier for all businesses to use.
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