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Is this section for you?
There's a lot of material all over the Web-and even elsewhere on the UniTargetSoft site-that talks about the technical aspects of AJAX and the challenges and benefits it brings to Web application developers.

But if you're a line-of-business manager, a C-level executive, or even a senior IT manager just trying to figure out what all the fuss is about, you've come to the right place. We'll try to keep this a relatively 'jargon-free zone', and we're not going to talk much about products or technology. Instead, we'll focus on what likely matters much more to you from a '50,000 foot level': What's AJAX, why should you care, and what kinds of real business benefits can it provide for you and your organization? Read on and we'll tell you more!

The changing face of Web applications
The World Wide Web was originally envisioned as a way to easily communicate unstructured information and to provide users with a simple way to navigate between pages of that information using a Web browser. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) was designed to easily create and format those pages, and it's handled that mission pretty well since the Web began to take off in the mid 1990's. We've all grown accustomed to HTML's "page-at-a-time" design: Click on a link, your browser screen clears, and an entirely new page is sent to replace it. Those of you who grew up with slow speed dialup links probably remember (not fondly!) how your browser screen turned white, followed by a long delay while the next page was downloaded and displayed. Maybe not real elegant, but hey, it was simple and it got the job done for the 'informational' websites of the day.

The Web wasn't ever as functional or useful as client software, and AJAX just knocks that ball out of the park." Seth Sternberg, co-founder of Meebo.com (News.com)
Now fast-forward about ten years: Internet usage is pervasive, broadband links have become common, and we're using the Web not only to deliver information but as the de facto way of handling business transactions. We still refer to "Websites", but "Web applications" have joined that older term. Whether our applications are internal or customer-facing, we all love the idea of delivering them anywhere in the world without distributing or installing client-side software. But we hate giving up the usability, speed, power, and flexibility users have come to expect with traditional "fat client" applications. And that's where the huge limitations of traditional HTML are painfully apparent to businesses as well as to your customers. Users quickly become frustrated, to the point that they simply give up and walk away. Online shopping cart abandonment rates over 80% are common, as are unfinished financial applications and uncompleted transactions. At the risk of more jargon, users miss the usability that's easy to achieve with 'event-driven' programs-a paradigm that just can't duplicated with HTML.

"Until Google put this technology out there, no one was really thinking of Web pages as applications" - Francis Shanahan, Sapient Corp. (SAPE) Software Architect
Rich Internet Applications (known as RIAs) are changing all that. Put simply, RIAs give us the best of both worlds: they deliver the usability of traditional applications, but over a standard Web browser on the internet. For lots of good reasons, what's now called 'AJAX' (Asynchronous Java and XML) is by far the most popular approach for creating RIAs. There are also proprietary tools like Adobe's Flash that use different technologies to accomplish similar results.

So what's AJAX all about?
There's no question that AJAX is one of the most talked-about new technologies in the entire application development market space. So let's try to explain in clear business terms what AJAX and RIA are all about.

First, you need to understand that AJAX is not a product. It's not even a single technology or a standard. Instead, it's a broad set of existing open technology standards and methods (more technical jargon like HTML, JavaScript, Dynamic HTML, DOM, XMLHttpRequest, and XML). Collectively, these allow delivery of truly dynamic content on a Web page without constantly resending entire pages. Once a page has been displayed, only the bits of data that have actually changed are transmitted and refreshed. And even better, AJAX relies on the power of the user's computer and Web browser to perform many of the tasks that traditionally had to be done on the server. With AJAX, when the user clicks on a column heading to resort data, or wants to use click-and-drag to rearrange the columns, it all happens instantly right there on the client side-no data at all is sent or received from the server. While AJAX is too often used to simply add flashy "how-did-they-do-that" front ends onto existing websites and applications, the real power of AJAX lies in its ability to enable a whole new breed of rich Web applications that we couldn't even consider tackling with current HTML.

By now you're probably saying, "Great! Let's use some of this cool AJAX stuff to improve our e-business and customer-facing applications-and while we're at it, we can deliver all our internal applications via Web browsers too."

Unfortunately, it's not that easy (is it ever?). All of the underlying technologies to do AJAX have been around for awhile now, but the key word two paragraphs earlier was "collectively". Cobbling all these disparate technologies together to deliver a working AJAX-based RIA is not for the faint of heart-we're talking about a challenge that even leading analyst firm Gartner referred to as "rocket science". That's why the first commercial AJAX applications came from companies with huge advanced R&D groups like Flickr or Google (Maps and Gmail).

UniTargetSoft released the first versions of our Project Register Suite several years ago and through mid 2005 there was very little market awareness of AJAX. But once end users experienced the usability of apps like Google Maps, old-fashioned HTML seemed positively archaic by comparison and the market for AJAX development solutions took off like lightning. As of mid-2006, there are about 70 different products-some commercial; but mostly unsupported open-source tools-that claim to ease the challenges of creating AJAX front-ends. More on that a bit later.

Why is this important to me?
Put simply, AJAX-based RIAs offer improve dramatic improvements in usability, productivity, and functionality for both current and new Web-based applications. You can now deliver Web apps that look and feel like standard desktop applications with rich interactive content. This translates directly into benefits like increased online revenue through reduced website abandonment and higher sales conversion rates, lower IT infrastructure costs and better performance, higher rates of user satisfaction and loyalty, reduced customer support costs, and competitive differentiation.

"Ajax enables better user experiences on the Web, which can help businesses gain a competitive advantage." Microsoft Product Manager Brian Goldfarb, InformationWeek
AJAX empowers new ways for Web applications to interact with the user that were previously only available with desktop applications. The resulting user experience is richer because the application feels more like a desktop application with regards to responsiveness, interactivity, intuitiveness, and overall usability. This improved usability leads to stronger business results because the experience is much more like what users are accustomed to, and they now have the flexibility to quickly accomplish business transactions on the Web. Because no software is installed on the client machines, enterprises enjoy dramatically lower costs for application deployment and maintenance, as well as lower support-center costs by completely eliminating all the calls related to application installation and configuration. Imagine taking an installable software application and converting it to a purely Web-based service accessible by anyone, anywhere in the world, using only a basic Internet connection and a standard Web browser. This is the promise of RIAs, and AJAX (often in combination with service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and other new server-side technologies) is a key component to making RIAs a reality.

The business benefits of AJAX
As is true with many newer technologies, you'll find that much of the material discussing the 'benefits of AJAX' in fact focuses on IT-related benefits such as increased developer productivity, integration with existing systems, and support for technical standards.

These are surely important corporate benefits, but they're not particularly relevant to you as a line-of-business manager. They certainly won't compel you to invest the time and effort to spearhead an AJAX-based RIA project, especially with mission-critical applications where introducing any new technology carries risks that must be more than offset by potential business benefits.

So while they may be harder to quantify, here are just a few of the very real business benefits that lead to a rapid return on investment (ROI) from AJAX RIAs.

Improve employee productivity and accuracy: Better user interfaces enable a more natural workflow that results in fewer human errors-errors that can carry huge financial costs in terms of lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction, among others. And while the time savings generated by the improved productivity of AJAX may seem insignificant at first, if you have hundreds of people using your Web application multiple times a day, the ROI impact can be substantial. (For an interesting study that quantifies the time savings of an AJAX-based transactional system, see "Measuring the Benefits of Ajax" by Alexei White at www.developer.com.)
Increase the value of business information: Developers can use AJAX to deliver new kinds of data visualizations and interactivity that would have traditionally been possible only on the desktop. By providing these capabilities to a much broader audience of Web-based users with no client-side software, AJAX leverages your investments in information assets.
Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO): AJAX generally offers much lower costs when compared to those of a traditional application, including the impact of yearly licensing of proprietary desktop software, as well as distribution, installation, and support costs.
Reach New Audiences: Forward-thinking government agencies have worked with UniTargetSoft to reduce costs by extending intuitive self-service applications to audiences who found earlier Web applications too difficult, inflexible, and slow to use on a regular basis.
Increase Sales:Frustrated by lower than expected online sales, large pharmaceuticals companies have used UniTargetSoft to drive revenues by replacing their old Web-based B2B e-commerce system with an easier to use, highly interactive AJAX-based purchasing application. Providers of business-to-consumer products and financial services have achieved similar benefits through measurable reductions in website abandonment and higher sales conversion rates. And advertising-supported business information sites generate more revenue from 'stickier' websites that use AJAX interactivity to keep visitors on the site much longer than would be possible with static HTML pages.
Lower support center costs:The elimination of client-side software installation, in combination with a more intuitive, capable, responsive, and flexible user interface, can dramatically reduce both the number and complexity of customer support calls-freeing your agents to focus on more productive tasks.
Boost customer satisfaction and loyalty:With the total number of online shoppers leveling out, the research firm Jupiter Group reports that retaining current customers has now become a higher priority for firms engaged in online commerce than gaining new customers. Delivering a very positive online user experience can be a major contributor to both satisfaction and ongoing loyalty for future purchases.
Reduce costs of IT infrastructure: While the cost of bandwidth does not increase linearly, it does increase in sizable steps as the company is forced to invest in larger-capacity Internet connections and new hardware to accommodate greater server loads. The cost structure for bandwidth depends on the scale of the operation and these capital investment needs. Since AJAX-based applications consume a lot less bandwidth, these upgrade costs can be dramatically curtailed.
AJAX implementation challenges
Earlier, we mentioned that there are many tools now coming to market that claim to ease the creation of AJAX applications. But an AJAX tool by itself doesn't represent anything close to a complete solution to business needs and leaves a lot of open questions. For example:

Is the tool supported commercially? Do you have confidence that it will continue to be enhanced with new functionality, and that it will be solid enough for mission-critical use?
If you're considering using one of the many open-source toolkits, will timely support and maintenance services always be available when you need them?
Does the product truly support open standards to give you the maximum future flexibility, or does it tie you into other proprietary products (development environment, languages, deployment platforms, architectures, etc.)
Will resulting applications run on any major browser (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.), or will users be forced to choose between only one or two of these?
AJAX can give you a front-end user interface, but what about the rest of the application (server architecture, data bindings, etc.)
Do you have the right staff training and experience to tackle the job internally?
What architecture should you use for your applications?
What applications can generate the largest benefits from the addition of AJAX, and what's the best way to implement them?
How can you reduce risks while ensuring that you maximize the potential benefits?
To answer these and truly capture all that is possible with AJAX technology while minimizing risk, you'll want expert advice and guidance you can count on-from people who have been successfully working with AJAX for years and are taking a visionary role in defining next-generation Web application development. UniTargetSoft is that trusted partner.

" - developing an application to a Google-level benchmark involves a "rocket science" level of difficulty" --Ray Valdez,Gartner
Unlike the majority of AJAX vendors that merely deliver development tools, we leverage our experience to create complete AJAX solutions to your specific business challenges and opportunities. Our proven Ready, Set, Go to AJAX methodology starts with a low-cost, no-risk, fixed-price assessment engagement and proof-of-concept that will help you answer all of the questions above-regardless of what product you ultimately use, whether you do the work yourself, or have us do it for you.