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Rick Strahl (ASP.NET MVP) has a great article called Past the AJAX Hype - Some things to think about. It's about the applicability of AJAX in web-based business applications.

"AJAX is hot and people are falling all over themselves to be associated with this technology. As happens so often in this field, some new technological feature (in this case not even new) gets hyped way out of proportion and the press goes wild. Oh and the trendy developers and IT guys go right along."

Yep. And the big "AJAX Manifesto" if you will was written by, a user experience company! Even Jesse James Garrett, who penned the AJAX term, says:

"If anything about current interaction design can be called “glamorous,” it’s creating Web applications."

But how, especially if you're building business applications, do you use AJAX effectively? Rick points to a contest Tim Haines started that basically asks what part AJAX should play in business applications (the example is an online store, which Rick also sells one of, but it's applicability to corporate developers is also interesting).

One problem is that AJAX might not be considered "primary technology" yet:

"There are too many old browsers out there for one thing. XmlHttp is relatively new for Mozilla style browsers and Opera is just now getting it. Older browsers are going to be left out.  In addition, AJAX of course relies on JavaScript and if that’s turned off you are also locked out. In IE the XmlHttp object is an ActiveX object which is probably more serious because many IT departments lock out ActiveX usage on browsers completely."

Another issue, not a problem, is what does AJAX really add? Most people say "to avoid postbacks." Like Rick, I think that:

"POSTback speed is not a huge issue. But then I try to use old school efficiency in my apps and not do everything the Asp.NET brute force way which often results in humongous pages with ViewState out of control. Yup – believe it or not, but using traditional Web application development constructs like plain links, non-ViewStated grids actually result in better responding applications than all the crap ASP.NET often piles on by default."

So a properly constructed web application has less use for AJAX than maybe most people currently believe. There are some good reasons to use the technology, but much AJAX now is just "hey look what I can do" not what I should do to help the user. Data validation is a good example. Validating a zip code corresponds to the state entered would be a nice touch, especially if you can get a response back to the user that they accidentally typed in the wrong number. But these are small things which, although nice, don't merit the revolutionary hype we're seeing.

Rick also writes a pretty good argument against trying to recreate a rich-client application in the browser. Read his blog post to get the full story.