Jesse James Garret over at Adaptive Path provides a name for the development framework that is becoming increasingly common among some of the companies that are pushing the envelope of building a rich user experience in the browser. He calls it "Ajax":

The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web.

Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.

Products like Flickr, Google Maps, and Basecamp are using Ajax frameworks to build applications that don't make users wait for a page reload to perform simple tasks.

It's nuts to think that avoiding a page reload equates with a "rich user experience". When someone releases an abstracted Ajax framework--that is, a set of turn-key tools that will Ajax-enable a web app--that's when what we currently think of as a "rich user experience" will become passé.

When landscape-altering tools like that are in the hands of developers that are not working at Google or other companies that have developed similar internal frameworks, we're going to see a big shift in the way people expect to interact with their web applications.

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