AJAX: Ready to take on the old guard?

...administration of business applications easier, as it provides a built-in mechanism for backing up data and sending out updates, proponents said.

Developers can also take advantage of XML and Web services standards to fetch information from back-end data sources. For software users, this means that information on a Web page, such a search result or RSS feed, can updated automatically and without a reload of the page.

For all its promise, widespread use of AJAX still faces some hurdles. The development tools for writing AJAX-style applications are not as sophisticated as for other programming languages, industry executives said. To address this, products designed to make AJAX programming simpler have been released by a few companies, including JackBe, ClearNova and Midnight Coders.

Microsoft's grip
Although the idea of a Web-based alternative to Microsoft Office may sound threatening to the software giant, the company's products are deeply entrenched, particularly in the corporate market. The training costs associated with replacing Office alone make switching away from it very unlikely, said Joe Drouin, global chief information officer at TRW Automotive.

"The Windows-Office platform has become second nature to people," Drouin said. "There would have to be an amazingly compelling business case to convince me to go out and retrain 24,000 people on an all-new desktop environment, an all-new office environment and an all-new way of working."

For corporations, Microsoft has also gone to significant lengths to bring the benefits of Web server-based administration to Windows on the PC. For example, one feature called ClickOnce which will be available later this year, lets administrators install Windows applications from a server.

Microsoft executives argue that the rich graphics capabilities of native Windows applications, including multimedia, will outshine Web-only editions.

"The new kind of applications ISVs can make [with Windows Vista] will be dramatically different from what's possible with the Web application model. I think it's clearly differentiated," said Greg Sullivan, group product manager in charge of the Windows Vista client in a recent interview.

Still, the arrival of Web-based applications with user interfaces as good as those in PC applications is a big change. The shift is big enough to make the Web browser, 10 years after its invention, more appealing as a way for people to work with software.

"The advent of AJAX has the ability to create a structural shift people didn't see coming," Meebo's Sternberg said. "The Web wasn't ever as functional or useful as client software, and AJAX just knocks that ball out of the park."

CNET News.com's Mike Ricciuti contributed to this report.