"The web itself becomes a platform under Ajax," Dion Hinchcliffe told an audience in the main ballroom of New York's Roosevelt Hotel during his opening presentation at the Real-World Ajax Seminar. Hinchcliffe said Ajax is helping developers build "the next generation of web applications" while also working well with SOA approaches that are becoming increasingly popular.

Ajax has "a dynamic user interface, SOA enablement, well as OS and /browser independence," he said.  "(And) Ajax and SOA are made for each other, because Ajax requries web services, and SOA is web services." Hicnchliffe stated that "80 percent of all software development will be on SOA by the year 2008. SOA and Ajax share many common elements, such as a zero footprint, no plug-ins or administrative rights, dynamic GUI, they can be made secure, Javascript of course, and "they can communicate and combine data from web services anywhere in the world."

Hinchcliffe dived into many of the details of Ajax development during this session, pointing out the emergence of JSON (Javascript Object Notation), for example, which he said "is not every readable but very quick." He also described a variety of frameworks, including Microsoft's Atlas, Google's GWT, and the "super lightweight" Ruby on Rails.

He also noted that "Web 2.0-style Ajax mash-ups and SOA clients are converging...there are now 600 mash-ups, with three or four new ones coming out every day. The cost is low, and you can do it in an afternoon." He added that "the biggest constraint is that you can't talk to other web services without creating a proxy, and this creates hotspots," but pointed out that many companies, including TIBCO, are working to ease this problem for developers and IT managers.

Hinchcliffe's presentation was carried live on SYS-CON.TV, as will many of the presentations be carried live over the two-day conference, which is being colocated with SOA Web Services Edge and the Enteprise Open Source Conference and Expo.