The Real-World AJAX Seminar is being held in San Jose, Calif., next week. Meanwhile, a two-day AJAX technical conference, AjaxWorld Conference & Expo, is planned for this October in Santa Clara, Calif.

Consultant Jesse James Garrett, who invented the term AJAX in 2005, will be speaking about what he describes as the AJAX "phenomenon" at the San Jose seminar. Garrett is director of user experience strategy and a co-founder of Adaptive Path, which he categorizes as a product strategy firm.

"What has happened since I coined the term AJAX [is] there has been this enormous groundswell of activity among independent designers and developers taking up this concept and running with it," Garrett said. "One of the really [special] things about AJAX is that it's not a technology platform that was handed down from on high by some vendor, but it's this loose collection of browser-native technologies that the interest in which has really come from the bottom up."

No vendor has driven AJAX, but now vendors such as Microsoft must accommodate to it, Garrett said. Microsoft's planned Atlas technology is a response to AJAX, he said.

"It's going to be interesting to see how the major platform vendors respond to this groundswell of interest in AJAX," Garrett said.