Ajax seems to be all the rage for web development right now. No, in case you were wondering, an Ajax is not some kind of cleaning kit that you use to clean your monitor or CPU case… 🙂

Ajax actually stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.

If you are still clueless after the previous sentence, just think of Ajax as providing a set of tools which form the building blocks for interactive applications (think GMail) that you can access through your browser. This allows, for example, the “drag and drop” that we are so familiar on any Windows PC on a web page that you visit, and is certain to revolutionalize how we go about everyday tasks in the near future. It is already quite conceivable that an entire word processor that is responsive can be built as a web application thanks to Ajax. Well, Max Kiesler has posted a Round-up of 50 AJAX Toolkits and Frameworks. This is an impressive resource which hopefully I will get to explore more one of these rainy days.