[t] AJAX is rising

I was buying a laptop from Dell online store some other day last week, and immediately found a change in the configuration interface. When a certain configuration item is chosen, the related price of the other choices were adjusted instantly, together with the total price.

That's AJAX, which was not new for me. I've been using its precedessor - DHTML - since 1999, to update the picture captions in a webpage. What's new for me is the bursting trend of deploy AJAX on webpage interfaces. To name a few: Gmail, Google map, Yahoo Instant Search. Microsoft again is holding the "wait and see how far you guys go" attitude.

Clearly AJAX is rising, although the techniques seem trivial. In the web market field, the referees who really counts are the common users, and the majority favor to Gmail does indicate AJAX's popularity.

[update on 3/8/2006]
Microsoft launched Windows Live today. With AJAX floating windows and dynamic pagelets.