More from Seeley on AJAX & RIA

<<There are so many Ajax frameworks that even Richard Monson-Haefel,
who has been working in the rich Internet application (RIA) space
since its inception, finds it difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Monson-Haefel left Burton Group earlier this year to become vice
president of developer relations at Curl Inc. Curl had technology
based on MIT research, which he liked so much he joined the Cambridge,
Mass. company to support its RIA platform. But in an interview with
SearchSOA.com, Monson-Haefel temporarily doffed his Curl hat to offer
his assessment of where the Ajax framework market stands today.

It is not a market that is easy to predict and it may be that way for
some time to come as he explains.

"I used to do the Ajax survey with Ajaxian.com where I put out all the
Ajax flavors and asked people which they used," he recalled. The first
year, 2005, there were 48 frameworks that appeared to be top of the
list for what was then an emerging technology, and he thought that was
too many.

So he wrote a paper for Burton Group that said there's no way the
ecosystem can support 48 frameworks. He was sure it was going to
consolidate.

At that time, he thought the Ajax market would follow the path of the
early SOAP toolkit market, which had a lot of players in the first few
years of the Web services revolution, but then consolidated around one
Java toolkit.

But in 2006, when he did the next survey, he found 160 frameworks. The