Ajax Development

I have always been a bit skeptical of new technologies. Back in the days when I was at college, I only dabbled in HTML then for an assignment, I decided tocreate a shopping cart using ASP and Dreamweaver. To be honest, I had no clue of what I was doing. I could not get my head round dynamic websites or how to implement them. But practice really did make perfect once I understood how it all worked. managed to finish my assignment, got a good grade and was happy as Larry. But I just got tired of ASP as whole particularly with trying to sort out database connection error (IIS and all) and started using PHP. The whole process started again but now I can safely say I am pretty good with PHP. I do dabble in a few other things as well. Coldfusion and ASP.NET though I have to admit the latter really has me stumped. Easy step up from Visual Basic?? I think not.

Now there is AJAX. Initial thoughts, over-hyped, problems if javascripts is disabled etc.. But the closer I looked at some of the examples online, the more I liked the damn thing. Drag and Drop, window effects and much more. Dont think this will be replaciong flash anytime soon, but its sure going to put some serious hurt on it. Nevertheless, I can welcome the prospect of using AJAX on future websites with open arms.