Backbase, a company specializing in rich Internet applications, published as long ago as in 2005 a whitepaper entitled "AJAX and Beyond" to explain their Backbase Presentation Client, designed to interact with their Presentation Server.

And some Microsoft developers, while acknowledging that AJAX is a very important piece of the puzzle, and solves many of the problems faced when creating responsive Web user interfaces, claim that AJAX isn't really asynchronous at all when it comes to HTTP requests. ("An AJAX Web request is a synchronous Web request just like any other," writes Brendan Tompkins, for example. "All AJAX solutions really are doing is using the browser's built-in threading - via JavaScript - to make multiple Web requests for you, and then updating the page when the server responds.") Tompkins' notion of "Beyond AJAX" is to use what he calls "real-life honest to goodness asynchronous method invocation on the server."

Securing AJAX
Before we worry about Beyond AJAX, though, there are many developers (and companies) who believe we should first worry about securing the AJAX apps we currently have. A world-beating pioneer of better AJAX security, Billy Hoffman, has even developed a groundbreaking one-day "Bootcamp" that will be premiered at AJAXWorld 2008 East in New York City (March 18-20, 2008).

Among other innovations, Hoffman has a whole new never-before-seen AJAX application that AJAX Security Bootcamp attendees will get to hack against, before using the app just attacked as a catalyst to lead the discussion about how to secure AJAX applications. "The audience will have probably missed some vulnerabilities in the application they just hacked and I will use that to illustrate how hard AJAX can be to QA and how to properly perform QA tests," Hoffman tells AJAXWorld Magazine.