Kudos to Jack for putting out such a professional package - lots of good stuff to play with for creating some serious desktop apps!

Check it all out and download at http://extjs.com/

So the big news this week is that MySpace is now the number one site on the net in terms of monthly page views. Yahoo! was the previous leader, but there was a drop off this month which put them in second. While this is kind of a good thing for ColdFusion - assuming they keep things running smoothly :) - it's a bit misleading for Yahoo! as this exact day was predicted long ago before they even launched the new home page.

But reading a little more into it, one can see that the drop-off in page views can be attributed to Yahoo!'s recent foray into Ajax. Everything from the Yahoo! front page, to mail, news, television, etc., has been getting an Ajax once-over at Yahoo. But what's better for the consumer is not always better for the site - on the surface anyway.

People have been warning that the web is in need of better metrics than the page-view. That has never been more true than now. I can only imagine how some of the better-designed, one-page Ajax sites might show up as a mere blip on the radar screen which can be misleading.

Going a step further, it could be argued that MySpace has stayed away from Ajax on purpose just to pump up their page views. I'll refer you to this study by Mike Davidson of Netvibes.com which points out how MySpace could cut their page views by over 2/3rds if they wanted to. So until traffic analyzers learn to deal with Ajax, take what you read with a grain of salt!

Over the weekend, Ajaxian released the results of their September 2006 web poll which surveyed 865 web users over the course of a week. Here's a look at which server-side languages are driving the AJAX revolution:

Although it didn't make the chart, it should be noted that 2% of those surveyed indicated they use Adobe's Flex Toolkit and another 2% said they use the Flex/Ajax bridge, so Flex is in the picture as well.

As for the most popular AJAX frameworks, Prototype and Script.aculo.us were far and away the winners being used by 43% and 33% respectively. The next closest was Dojo with 19%.

The raw results of the survey are also available.

The folks at ideAjax have come up with another cool one-page AJAX application at http://www.sanebull.com.

The app is built with lots of my favorite tools including Prototype, Prototype Windows, and Scriptaculous effects.  Check it out and get inspired!

One of the topics that surfaced at CFUNITED and seems to be coming up more frequently is how AJAX-based sites deal with 508 Accessibility issues.  Having just come off crutches last week, I have definitely developed a sensitivity to these issues.  AJAX development presents a real challenge to the current generation of screen-reader technologies.  While it's not impossible to create a fully-accessible site, it is a tough hurdle to clear. 

There are ways to use javascript links and href links at the same time so that non-AJAX (and non-javascript) browsers will be able to access the same content.  But this proves much more difficuly when looking at the traditional AJAX development cycle.  To have an fully accessible site, each and every page must be able to be shown with it's full content.  It is much easier when starting with an existing site which is already compliant, and then adding the AJAX features on top of that for some bells and whistles.

My personal feelings?  AJAX is way too revolutionary for the assistive-technology vendors to ignore, and they will find a solution.  That doesn't mean developers can or should ignore the issues - we should continue to make our pages 508 compliant by making sure all of our tags are complete.  But once we get to the browser, everything should be standard HTML or XHTML at that point anyway, so I would imagine it wouldn't be too tough to have the screen-reader technology detect a push of content to the browser and then just read or display that content.

Want to read some more on the issue?  Check out these 40 articles and tutorials on the subject from Max Kiesler's blog.

This one is just too cool..  Developer Pete Nixey created this site as a proof-of-concept.  Eventsites is a full-fledged application that uses no server logic and stores no data of it's own.  We've all seen the Google map mashups, but this really takes things to the next level and shows the power of what can be created in today's Web 2.0 environment.

This is a 1 page AJAX application that merely acts as a "client to other webservices".  Pretty neat stuff!

Visit Pete's blog to find out how this was created.

CFUNITED is quickly approaching, and I've been working on a new AJAX-Based Scheduler for the CFUNITED team.  You can take the new scheduler for a test drive at http://ajaxcf.com/cfunited/.  Please be aware that this is only a test version and your information will not be used for any real reservations.

You can add a session to your schedule by either clicking on the time it is given or by dragging-and-dropping onto the correct day.

The schedule and session information should be pretty accurate and up to date...

Please send in any comments or suggestions!

For those in the New Jersey area, I'll be giving a preso to the Central Jersey ColdFusion User Group tomorrow at 1:30pm.  You need to be registered in advance at http://www.cjcfug.us as the talk will be hosted at AT&T in Piscataway, NJ.

I'll be doing an overall review of AJAX and then we'll deconstruct some real applications to see what's going on behind the scenes.  I'll get the presentation and some more samples posted here afterwards.

In the first post of this series, we looked at a really basic AJAX example. We simply pulled the time and date into our page via an AJAX call.  In this post, we'll take things a step further by passing a variables in and using it in the output.

For this example, we'll take an input string and output it in reverse.

Here is a working sample:

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