Enterprises warm up to Ajax

Over half of all the enterprises will be using Asynchronous Javascript and XML (Ajax) technology within the next two years, according to new data from market research firm Evans Data Corporation.

"The growth in the number of developers should be significant over the next years," John Andrews, president with Evans Data Corporation said in a presentation at the AjaxWorld conference in Santa Clara, California.

Based on an international survey of developers, Andrews said that the adoption rate of the Ajax developer platform is "as extreme as any of the other technologies that we are tracking," comparing it to the adoption rates of Eclipse and Flash.

The firm estimates that there were 10.8m software developers worldwide in 2004, which is set to increase to 17.1m by 2009. Currently 1.7m developers write code in Ajax and another 1.2m have evaluated the technique and are preparing to start using it, said Andrews.

Ajax is a Web development technique that allows developers to create interactive Web applications.

A static webpage exchanges data only when a user clicks on a link or button. Ajax applications transmit data behind the scenes, making for more responsive and user-friendly online applications that resemble regular desktop applications.

The technique is best known of its applications by consumer websites like Digg, Flicr and Gmail.

Enterprise adoption is important for the Ajax market because it tends to drive sales of commercial developer tools and services. Most of today's the consumer facing applications use internally developed tools or open source too ls such as the Dojo Toolkit.

In the enterprise space, Ajax is mostly used for business to business e-commerce applications and consumer e-commerce applications, said Andrews, but he projected that it will soon broaden its reach.

"You should be pretty bullish [about the future of Ajax]. Forty per cent of the developers are quite enthusiastic and expect their usage of Ajax to increase by more than 50 percent next year."

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