One more point of contention, mostly to frame the difference between AJAX and Flex 2, and why there is such a disparity between the tooling. Flex 2 is a closed system, developed by a single company. It's hard to disagree that the tooling of the Flex 2 SDK in Eclipse is better than Ruby on Rails + Prototype.js in my Emacs editor. But even Flash/Flex suffers under browser incompatibilities (Object vs. Embed tag, SWFObject vs. UFO wrapper, etc...Flash 9 player funkyness on the Mac Intel platform.) As for a Java Plug-in, can you name a single site that you use on a regular basis that has one. I can't, but I may not be looking in the right places. BTW: Great stuff in your blog...and happy to see you are are using Linebuzz to open up the debate.

You seem to imply that a magical tool could be created to bridge one's understanding of the fundamentals of HTML rendering (and the manipulation of HTML/DOM with CSS and Javascript.) If AJAX isn't very deep, neither is HTML, DOM manipulation, CSS, or Javascript (since there is no AJAX without them.) I'm curious how you have come around from WS* to REST, but don't see the value in keeping it simple for AJAX sans a massive, obfuscating framework to hide behind.

I would argue that the simplicity of AJAX style web development lends itself to being over-tooled. In most cases, websites don't even use the X in AJAX because navigating a second DOM from the response XML just isn't as easy as accessing elements of serialized Javascript. I think the complexity of AJAX is completely blown out of proportion.

Can't think of an external applicaiton that uses Java applets off hand, but there are intranet applicaitons that use it. That said, all of the leading solutions have issues. None are perfect including Ajax. I like Ajax, but at the time I wrote this blog I was just pointing out that its not a silver bullet. p.s. Linebuzz is cool but I wish it had a better interface.

No. Not a magical tool. But let me ask you, do you use an IDE for Java development? Most people do. That's the kind of tool I'm talking about - right now the tooling for Ajax is just starting to find its footing while tooling for Java, for example, is very advanced. You don't have to hide the workings of JavaScript, CSS, DOM, and HTML when using tooling.

Interesting point. I think however, it's less about XML than it is about combining the use of JavaScript, CCS, and browser idiosyncrasies. For people who are well versed in JavaScript and CCS Ajax is probably easy, but the developer audience for Ajax is larger than that and so better tooling is needed to accommodate those who are not expert web page developers.