Is Ajaj the new Ajax?

APIs and mashups are the bread and butter of the Sunlight Labs. In fact, the official name of the the Labs is actually The Sunlight Mashup Labs, so it is perhaps not surprising that we headed off to the MashupCamp 3 at MIT, Cambridge a couple of weeks ago to geek out and to see the latest happenings, trends and players in the world of mashups and technology.

The history of computing has some interesting trends. First it was all about mainframes. To get anything computed you had to logon to some remote machine so large that if filled a room. Then came along the desktop; desktop apps were (and arguably still are) it. In the 1990's, however, things got pushed onto the web, web sites were the thing, and now with the rise of Ajax, web apps are becoming the new it.

While reading a couple of posts in Ajaxian about hacking the canvas tag with a flickr stream and a mootools-based image gallery stream it struck me just how sophisticated some Ajax-based UIs have become, so much so that it has become harder to tell what is and is not flash.