Its been almost two years since Ajax exploded onto the web, with more and more sites adopting it for pretty much everything. In my view, one of the defining things about 2006 has been the maturity of Ajax as a web technology. Frameworks such as Dojo and Prototype have came a long way, facilitating JavaScript development and offering out-of-the can functionality. We have also seen many hosted applications such as Yahoo Mail and .Mac using Ajax to enhance the user experience available, and we are getting to the stage where this kind of functionality is also cropping up in other web applications, from e-commerce to social networks.If 2005 was the time when geeks were going wild with the technology, 2006 has been the year where developers have sat down and thought “How can I best use this to create a better website?”, and this has really helped Ajax to break into the mainstream.To compliment this, we have seen some great strides in the tools available to the developer, in particular, browser extensions such as Firebug which really are a godsend when it comes to testing and debugging applications.Of course its not all good, we are seeing one bad side effect of this Ajax explosion - page bloat. Using the Prototype library adds about 50kb to the page weight, Dojo can add as much as 300kb (especially as very few people seem use the include system). Obviously, if you are building a JavaScript heavy application then this is justifiably, but I do see a lot of sites which use frameworks specifically for a single piece of functionality, such as the $ function or a single visual effect. In these cases, we need a way of stripping down our JavaScript libraries based upon the functionality we, the page authors, require.Thankfully, for 2007 it looks as though there is a solution for this, in the form of JS Linker. A Java application which analyzes your code and removes JavaScript functions which are not used. Although its currently in its early stages, this one is worth keeping an eye on.Another such tool to watch is Flash Aid, which uses Flash in order to solve a big challenge faced by Ajax developers - using JavaScript alone, there is no way of knowing if someone is using a screen reader, and thus you cannot offer screen reader specific content/functionality to boost the accessibility of your site. Flash Aid, developed by Jeremy Keith and Aral Balkan, is a small piece of Flash which sits invisibly on your page. It allows JavaScript to check if a screen reader is present, using the built-in API’s within Flash.So, 2005 had lots of developers getting excited, 2006 put a bit more structure around this and presented us with some new challenges (many of which we discover have been faced by the Flash community for years - we can look there for inspiration and potential solutions) and plenty of opportunities for innovation. Here’s to a happy 2007 for the Ajax community! (more…)