The Global Appeal of Ajax

A 2006 survey by Evan Data described the adoption of Ajax as higher in areas outside of North America. Perhaps like some of you, I regularly think that the technology world revolves around the United States. But once I got this idea stuck in my head, I started seeing evidence of the worldwide appeal of Ajax everywhere I looked.

Certainly, my own company has its share of Ajax customers outside of the good ole USA. And about half of the visitors to our website are typically from outside North America. JackBe's 'Ajax Best Practices' paper has been downloaded hundreds of times by people from as far away as Brazil, India, China, and New Zealand.

Why the trend? I think can summarize the collective wisdom of many of JackBe's customers by saying Ajax can help address thorny application deployment problems in remote areas of a company. Well-tuned Ajax applications are easier to deploy and can run much faster than typically-chatty client-server apps. In other words, a well-designed Ajax application can make a remote office into a viable business location without the need for on-site IT staff or heavy application deployment tools.

What's this mean to Ajax buyers? Philosophically, it just reinforces the idea that the Internet has all but eliminated the distance between sellers, buyers and ultimate users of Web-based technologies like Ajax. Practically speaking, I think this trend means many things. It should certainly be a reminder that your users can realistically be from anywhere on the globe. And on the flip side, you need to be open to the idea that your best Ajax partner/provider/implementor might not be (or need to be!) from Manhattan or Seattle.

We are now officially in a global village. Ajax is both part of the reason and one of the proof points.