Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications

If anything about current interaction design can be called “glamorous,” it’s creating Web applications. After all, when was the last time you heard someone rave about the interaction design of a product that wasn’t on the Web? (Okay, besides the iPod.) All the cool, innovative new projects are online.

Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that is being called as Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web.

Defining Ajax
Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
  
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
  
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
  
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
  
• and JavaScript binding everything together.

Who’s Using Ajax

Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach. All of the major products Google has introduced over the last year — Orkut, Gmail, the latest beta version of Google Groups, Google Suggest, and Google Maps — are Ajax applications. (For more on the technical nuts and bolts of these Ajax implementations, check out these excellent analyses of Gmail, Google Suggest, and Google Maps.) Others are following suit: many of the features that people love in Flickr depend on Ajax, and Amazon’s A9.com search engine applies similar techniques.

The above part was some programmer style introduction to the new buzz world of Ajax.Let's see some practical applications of Ajax on the web on different websites,bloggs.And guys didn't i tell u that this new buzz is being used on blogger also.The site Blogger Templates has some good design for bloggers, but u need to wait for some more days as the site is in it's testing status.

There's one more blogger site 3spots who has provided with the good list of Ajax startuppages(or homepages).You can find the list over here.