The Ajax Construction Kit taught me a lot of great things such as auto-completing the content of a search-box, create a rating system, and determining shipping costs based on location and price of certain mail carriers. After completing the book, it was clear that Ajax was a very powerful tool in web development when it comes to adding interactivity to a web site.
In search of more functions Ajax can provide, I came across this site: http://www.designvitality.com/blog/2007/10/43-exceptionally-useful-ajax-applications/. It is a list of 43 diverse Ajax applications to serve a wide range of purposes. One that interested me was an Ajax poll, that took the opinions of users and recorded them. Another one was amCharts which created a clean data driven pie chart to display the relationships between certain objects. The last application I will mention is the ability to create chat boxes with Ajax. This allows for users to talk to each other through instant messaging while browsing your site. Now that’s pretty interactive. It’s pretty amazing what we can already do with websites, It will definitely be interesting to see what it looks like in ten years.
