One of the best examples of a mash-up being made possible by the AJAX programming language is the work of Dr. Hans Rosling and his GapMinder program at Gapminder.org (Phelps, Cseh, 2009). Dr. Rosling has taken the data set from the United Nations and added in analytics to determine the correlation of income to health. He is a regular speaker at TED (Technology, Entertainment & Design) Conferences and is considered one of the top 20 presenters of all time at this distinguished and prestigious global conference. His insights into the correlation of income and health have been widely used by governments globally and he is a frequent lecturer at the U.S. State Department. Dr. Rosling's insights are well worth listening to on the TED site and also working with his Gapminder.org application as well. If JAX had not been invented and the rapid gains in programming performance not achieved, it is doubtful Dr. Rosling would have been able to gain such signikficant insights into the terabytes of data the U.N. And other agencies now share with him. Yet this is just one of thousands of examples of how thought leaders are reorienting what society knows and understands by being able to analyze data more accurately and efficiently with technologies the Internet is literally rushing into existence based on the unmet needs of its users. The implications of rapid Web application development platforms including AJAX are discussed next from the standpoint of its impact on businesses and society in greater depth.
Impact of Web-based Application Development and AJAX on Business
Given AJAX programming languages;' many benefits over HTML and previous generation approaches to development, it is understandable why it is beginning to dominate Web-based application development. Not only do AJAX-based applications provide significant speed increases over previous-generation applications based on page-based technologies they are also designed for prototyping an entire application prior to writing it as well (MacVittie, 2007). With many of the Fortune 1000 companied adopting AJAX as the development platform of choice for their enterprise-wide systems, XML as the integration technology is also getting much greater focus as well (Serrano, Aroztegi, 2007). This is...
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