The world at large seems to be gravitating towards AJAX applications. I suppose this shouldn’t be surprising, given the relative lack of differentiation when comparing today’s “rich” client apps with what can run inside of a browser. We’ve actually hit a low point on the client if you ask me: I actually prefer Outlook Web Access over the rich client because at least my web browser doesn’t hang as much. While rich media and ink have made client-side interactions (theoretically) more interactive, satisfying, and powerful, I have to admit that my personal day-to-day experience with client software is anywhere near what I’d like it to be.

It’s surprising (to me) that people can build such nice looking, responsive, and (dare I say?) rich programs with a whole lot of ingenuity, blood, sweat, and tears, all using technologies that date back to when I was a teenager and which have evolved at a tremendously slow pace. I mean, standards committees aren’t necessarily known for rapid innovation. What’s even more surprising is that, with a state of the art IDE, Visual Studio, impressive presentation stacks like Windows Forms and Presentation Foundation, and a killer VM and associated Framework, the momentum is decidedly in the web frontier. Thank God for ASP.NET.

The problem isn’t that I don’t understand the AJAX sales pitch. It’s that I can’t believe we haven’t solved those problems on the client and really set it apart.

Despite the A in AJAX standing from Asynchronous, the marriage with multi-core seems less obvious than the rich client even. When the computational edge is offloaded to a set of back-office machines running in an expensive data center, the need for tera[fl]ops on the client seems slightly farfetched. Those servers sure better have the goods, though.

It seems to me that concurrency in AJAX apps will be more about masking latency and aggregating content from disparate sources than anything else: issuing tons of network requests and letting them complete in an overlapped fashion. Fault tolerance is another really attractive feature that concurrency could buy you. A quick search turned up this post about a Scheme message passing AJAX library. Very handy, and in one of my favorite languages to boot. But I wonder how mainstream these techniques will become?

Maybe I’m not thinking big. Speech and handwriting recognition, data mining over terabytes of personal information (which, by the way, it seems you need access to a hard drive for; see, the client’s good for something! ...or was that GFS?), synthesis and analysis of complex business, scientific, financial, and personal problems, and so on, are all things I can easily see a rich client doing. But than again, there's no real reason that such things couldn't be packaged up into AJAX libraries and all executed inside of the browser. A CPU cycle is a cycle, regardless of whether it's in the data center or running inside a web browser. This is where technologies like Flash/Flex come into play, taking the web experience and incrementally improving it to deliver richer experiences.

Google has already mastered the art of offloading impressive and constantly improving analysis over hoardes of data to the data-center. It seems to me that they may also be in a position to transition some of this complex analysis onto the clients connected to that same data-center. A cluster of machine nodes lookes surprisingly similar to a cluster of CPU nodes. Cutting down on communication and data transfer costs is key in both domains. And after all, why waste all of that (potentially massive) computing power that the 8-, 16-, 32-, ... core client has available? Instead of dumbing down the algorithms that are shared by [b|m]illions of clients simply so that a finite amount of computing power can be evenly distributed among a statistical peak load of consumers, make the clients do some work for themselves instead. And of course, the "constantly improving" attribute needn’t be lost: after all, it’s just a JS file. (IP of course starts to matter.)

Or is this all something that only a totally integrated client package can provide (whatever that means)? I suppose we’ll eventually find out.