Ajax and the Hype Cycle It's official - Ajax is all the rage, and why shouldn't it be? The pioneers of the Ajax World have taken tremendous strides toward proving that Ajax techniques can deliver true benefits to web application users through a richer interaction model than standard web applications can provide. The vacuum of Ajax development technologies is rapidly being filled as startups and open source initiatives are being sucked out of garages and basements everywhere.

It seems that Ajax will be ubiquitous on the Web in no time flat. Now back to reality and a little curve that the Gartner Group drew in 1995 to illustrate the Hype Cycle associated with new technology adoption. That curve, as illustrated in Figure 1 below, has proven to be accurate time and again over the course of history in computation, and will undoubtedly hold true in relation to Ajax technologies. In fact, Gartner recently released their 2006 Technology Hype Curve, and Ajax is front and center in their analysis