Panelists noted that although AJAX can be difficult, it is still the way to go for desktop interaction in Web applications.

"Definitely, the reason to do AJAX is for those sexy, dynamic Web apps," said Eric Clayberg, senior vice president of product development at Instantiations.

Panelists supported consolidation in the area of AJAX runtimes, noting the existence of runtimes such as Dojo.

An audience member emphasized that rather than devising new technologies, it may be a good idea to leverage what has already been done. "They should be standing on the shoulders of giants," said Hal Hildebrand, an architect in Oracle's Java platform group, after the session. AJAX is a new interface technology and lots of work already has been done in this area, he said.

Another audience member, Kyle Shank, developer of the RadRails IDE for Ruby on Rails, cautioned against relying on a single framework for AJAX.