AJAX to Pick up with Mobile Device Growth

With the growth of mobile phones, and application development on devices like Google Android and the Apple iPhone, AJAX adoption will see a big rise. Dave Meeker, a lead developer with enterprise application provider Roundarch, said the industry is starting to see real Web browsers on these devices, and a real Web browser doesn't need a whole lot of power to run and render AJAX. However, it takes quite a bit of memory and processor to run a Flash or Silverlight application.

"I think until Adobe and Microsoft catch up with the mobile stuff, which will take about a year or year-and-a-half, anybody pushing applications out towards mobile devices is going to go the AJAX route," Meeker said. "I would assume a corporation will spend 'x' amount of dollars on a new initiative and if they're gonna build a mobile application, they want a seamless experience between the mobile application and the regular application. That means more AJAX adoption because they have to use AJAX on the phone."

As far as Microsoft and mobile development go, one rumor flying around currently is a platform called Kojax, which was brought to light by Mary-Jo Foley. Kojax will allow Microsoft applets to run in an Ajax-like way, using a combination of Visual Studio tools and JavaScript, on Java-based mobile phones. Microsoft did not confirm or deny the rumor, but Kojax is a name to keep on the backburner.