Sun is working on an alternative for Ajax
As per the company they are working on a web application development technology which would serve as an alternative to Ajax. Called the Project Flair it is an open source project which is still in the development stage. Before the end of the year the company has plans to unveil an experimental version of Flair for the developers.
It is a self supporting web programming kernel which would be written in JavaScript. Multi user whiteboard concept is being used in this project which almost presents an opposite approach to Ajax.
As per Dan Ingalls, Sun engineer and principal investigator on the project:
AJAX sort of deals with all of the old way of doing things. It makes it simpler, which is great, but underneath it's still all this junky HTML, Document Object Model, CSS, all that stuff, where 30 years ago, we knew how to do that stuff cleanly with a dynamic programming language and a simple graphics model.
It is expected that Flair could lead to innovative project concepts and increase the overall productivity of Sun's customers.