ASP.NET to Support AJAX Development

A preview of a set of ASP.NET extensions offers a glimpse of future improvements, including support for AJAX-a popular combination of Web technologies that can make browser applications more interactive and responsive without requiring multimedia plug-ins such as Flash. The extensions, code-named Atlas, will also be incorporated into the next version of ASP.NET, due in early 2007 as part of Visual Studio “Orcas.”

Making Browser Applications Better

Developers frequently struggle with deciding how to build the user-interface portion of their applications. Traditional thick clients (desktop applications) generally provide better performance, more features, and the possibility of working while disconnected from the network, while thin clients (browser applications) offer centralized deployment and upgrades as well as compatibility across a broader set of hardware and OSs.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or AJAX, is one way to increase the capabilities of thin clients while maintaining the ease of deployment and broad compatibility that have made them appealing. Specifically, AJAX applications combine HTML improvements that offer visually appealing interfaces, such as Cascading Style Sheets, with the ability to retrieve additional XML data from the server without refreshing an entire Web page. The browser API used to retrieve XML data in the background is known as XmlHttpRequest, which is implemented as an ActiveX Control in Internet Explorer (IE) 6.0. (Apple’s Safari and Mozilla Firefox implement the API natively, as will IE 7.0, allowing it to be used even in environments where ActiveX Controls are disabled due to security restrictions.)