Ajax and Atlas
by
Randy Mears
The terms Ajax and Atlas have been with us for a long time; first as titans in Greek Mythology, then all manner of things, from rockets to racehorses to household cleaners. We just love to re-use these two words.
Lately, we are hearing more and more about Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) and Atlas in Web programming. Indeed, both of these terms have recently shown up in this blog. I think it may be worthwhile to talk a little about what Ajax and Atlas are about.
First of all, Ajax is a suite of technologies that enable the creation of rich, responsive and smoothly interactive Web pages that have a high degree of elegance and cross browser compatibility. In other words; Web pages that perform more like standalone GUI applications, at least from the user's perspective. Many of the technologies in the Ajax framework have been around for a while performing interactive Web magic. The kind of magic clearly demonstrated by Ajax pioneer Google and clearly visible in the Google Maps user interface.
So where does Atlas come in? Once we understand that Ajax is a framework for building interactive cross browser Web applications, we can talk about Atlas, which is a specific implementation of Ajax for .Net 2.0. The primary distinction is that Atlas has an enhanced foundation set because it also includes a set of client side controls that simplify the process of implementation. The catch for now is that Atlas is currently only available as a Beta.
