Today, the buzz on the net is still Ajax.
Just today, I was remembering a time about 4 years ago (around the time, my last child, KK, was born), I was working on a contract project as a Perl/Java guy. I remember back then playing with this web site that had a an open-source version/demo of the KnowNow stuff. Essentially, the browser used Javascript and a hidden iframe to do a neat dynamic dropdown menu. For example, you could pick a car manufacturer, and then the other drop down would get filled with the models for that manufacturer. The neat trick was that the second drop down didn’t have any data until the server sent back the list based on your first choice. This is my first experience with early Ajax.
Now, that was four years ago and it felt like a demo. There was that, ‘this is neat’ feel, but it would only work on IE. It definitely wasn’t smooth, either. It would be a risky proposition to use that technology in a web app back in those days. It wasn’t until the Google suggest demo was out that this stuff was ready to blow people away. Nowadays, both Firefox and IE can pull this stuff off, so you aren’t limiting yourself.
The lesson… stick with it! These technologies eventually find their place, so play with them while they are new. 🙂