Now for some fun, let's take a look at some existing AJAX sites to see how much AJAX makes a difference to website interactivity and usability.

Writely (www.writely.com) - Can there be an AJAX web application to replace the sophistication of Microsoft's word processing power house? Almost! Writely is a web based word processing application. It would not be fair to compare Writely with Microsoft Word. AJAX web applications are too new to go head to head with a desktop application with the history of Word, but it really is an excellent tool. It keeps versions of your documents as you work on them, it saves automatically every few seconds, and it has all the standard word processing features including a spell checker (although not instantaneous). Because it is web based, you can access your documents from any computer. Another advantage to a web based word processor is that a single document can be accessed by multiple people for review and collaboration. I'm not ready to abandon Word, but this is a powerful example of what an AJAX based web application can do.

Google Maps (maps.google.com) - The classic and most known example of the basic AJAX technique (although it's not pure AJAX since it uses a few different tools) is Google Maps. We've talked a lot about Google Maps is our newsletter on Local Search Let Your Fingers Do the Clicking so I won't comment on it here except to say that it is one of the best and most useful AJAX applications so far.

Google Suggest ( www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en)- I also talked about Google Suggest in a previous newsletter (What Else is Google Doing?) Google Suggest is an excellent example of the power of AJAX (also not technically AJAX), but again I've described it previously so I'll move onto something new.

A9 (www.a9.com) - A9 is Amazon.com's search engine. The neat thing about A-9 is that it can search through data sources other than websites. One of those sources is, of course, book results, but it also can search blogs, people, yellow pages, movies, and much more. While doing a search if you select any of these sources, new search results feed into the page through a dynamically added column on the search results page. You can easily toggle search areas on or off without researching or reloading the page.

Instant Domain Name Search (instantdomainsearch.com) - This site is really helpful if you are trying to find a domain name for a new site. There are so few good names left, and it is extremely time consuming to enter an idea, click search, wait for the response, and try again. Instant Domain Name Search is similar to how Google suggest works. A domain's availability is dynamically determined as you type each letter. Try typing in "big..." and you'll see that big.com is, of course, taken. Continue typing "bigtoast" and you'll discover to your dismay that while bigtoa.com and bigtoas.com are indeed available, bigt.com, bigto.com, and bigtoast.com are not. Bigtoaster.com is also not available. But Bigtoasters.com is! Anyway, it sure makes finding variations and checking on the availability of potential domain names much easier.

Netfix top 100 (www.netflix.com/Top100) - Netflix top 100 is a very simple example of AJAX but it shows how even a simple idea like displaying a movie's details on mouse-over, which would be very impractical without AJAX, improves the usefulness of the page. For any given movie, displaying its description with a small image would not require much data to be pre-loaded onto the page, but x100 graphics text add up to a really long page download. AJAX makes this page more useful and interesting by pulling the data for each movie from the server and "thin streaming" it onto the page without pre-loading or re-loading.


At Newfangled we are looking forward to including AJAX into a lot more of our sites. PlanUSA is one of the first, but we have more in development, and we plan on using it in our content management system and in its various mini-web applications (components) to make them faster and more robust tools for our clients. Being in the web development business is fun because there is always something new. It's even better when new technologies prove to make significant improvements in how the web works.