Best Practices and Challenges in Building Capable Rich User Experiences: Announcing Real-World Ajax

It's been nearly a year in the making but I'm finally pleased to announce the release of Real-World Ajax, a massive new compendium of the Ajax spectrum that I've compiled and edited with Kate Allen in conjunction with leading Ajax authors from across the country. While not generally available until later this month, with full availability on March 19th at the AjaxWorld Conference and Expo which I co-chair with SYS-CON Media's Jeremy Geelan, this book marks a significant milestone in the brief history of Ajax, rich user experiences in general, and the growing challenges and opportunities in this space as we continue to witness a tectonic shift in the way Web apps are designed and built.
The inevitable conclusion: The Web page metaphor is just no longer a compelling model for the majority of online Web applications. We are now rapidly leaving the era where static HTML is acceptable to the users and customers of our software. Combined with the rise of badges and widgets, the growing prevalence of the Global SOA to give us vast landscapes of incredibly high value Web services and Web parts, it's important to note that the use of Ajax is essential to even start exploiting these important trends. Skirting the corners of this phenomenon are also the non-trivial challenges offered up by largely abandoning the traditional model of the browser. Specifically, what happens to search engine optimiziation (SEO), disabled accessibility, link propogation (along with network effects), Web analytics, traditional Web user interface conventions, and more, which are all dramatically affected -- often broken outright -- by the Ajax Web application model?
Some of these questions are answered directly in Real-World Ajax, but many are as yet relatively unanswered in an industry struggling to deal with a major mid-industry change. The tools, processes, and technologies we've brought to bear to build Web applications are going to change a lot, as well as the skill sets. As I wrote in my Seven Things Every Software Project Needs to Know About Ajax , these types of rich Web applications require serious software development skills, particularly as the browser is a relatively constrained environment compared to traditional software development runtime environments like Java and .NET.
Of course, despite this issues -- even because of them -- it is a very exciting time to be in the Ajax business right now. One big reason is that there are few Ajax products with clear market dominance yet and the dozens and dozens of Ajax libraries and frameworks currently available often a very diverse and compelling set of options for use as the foundation of the next great Ajax application. While the Dojo Toolkit is probably the Ajax toolkit with the largest mindshare and lots of industry interest, the big vendors such as Microsoft and their Microsoft's ASP.NET Ajax (aka Atlas) show that the story is just as the first major products from big vendors make their way to market. There's little doubt that we'll continue to see the Ajax market maturing and I'm looking forward to a variety of upcoming improvement to Ajax such as Project Tamarin, the high-speed Javascript engine donated by Adobe to the Mozilla project, the ongoing evolution of OpenAjax, and the 1.0 release of Dojo sometime this year, to name just a few of the exciting things that have the potential to ensure Ajax continues to grow and evolve.

web usability checklist