Panelist Hani Sulieman, CTO of Formicary, said he favored the desktop. "In terms of richness of experience, I think the desktop is way superior to the browser," Hani said.

The Ruby on Rails open source Web framework featuring AJAX did not get a wholehearted endorsement, with an audience member saying it lacked maturity. The quality of error messages is nonexistent, for example, the audience member said.

AJAX technologies are not new, said Craig McLanahan, Sun Microsystems staff engineer, in a subsequent presentation at the conference. But what is new is a synergy between the ability to have XMLHttpRequest implementations in browsers and robust DHTML (Dynamic HTML) and JavaScript implementations, he said.

Speaking on the issue of Web frameworks, developers face five principal issues in choosing one, according McLanahan said. These include:

* Modeling of page navigation decisions,