Garrett recognizes that AJAX technologies themselves have been around for a while. But developers now have a name to use when referring to this approach to developing applications, he said. The main attraction of AJAX is it enables developers to break out of the page-based interaction model of Web applications, Garrett said. "It allows them to be more dynamic," he said.

AJAX, he acknowledged, is not without issues, such as a lack of tools. "There are issues with AJAX, and it's a young approach in a lot of ways," Garrett said. "We're still learning how to do it more effectively, and we're still creating tools for ourselves to improve our AJAX applications. That's where really most of the energy is right now, in the creation of tools and frameworks to make it easier and simpler to do this work."

Ruby on Rails, Garrett said, has become popular because it is one of the easiest ways to build an AJAX application.

A Mercury Interactive official earlier this week, however, cautioned against overuse of AJAX, saying it is not sufficiently structured.

"We've seen tons and tons of problems," with AJAX, said Rajesh Radhakrishnan, vice president of application delivery at Mercury.