I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning? "Because they can only give you answers."

Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that readers can themselves infer where AJAX is headed.

What are the top questions to ask next about AJAX?

Eric Miraglia of Yahoo!

1.  (From March'08) How do I calculate the ROI of building my RIA on the iPhone SDK vs using AJAX?

2.  How do I assess the performance of my app and decide what to do next to make it faster? 

3.  When it comes to accessibility, how do I know what's required of me for my rich web apps?  Beyond what's required, what makes good business sense?

4. What are the ten most important steps I can take to make sure my rich internet app is secure?  What tools are available to help me diagnose whether it's secure?

5. For all the press that they get, are mashups really contributing to the experience of the web? 

Douglas Crockford, creator of JSON

I just have one question I'd like answered: How are we to fix the web? AJAX exploits all of the remaining capability of the 1999 browser standards, which were not state of the art even then. Where do we go from here? Will open standards fall to technologically superior proprietary systems?

Coach Wei, founder and CTO of Nexaweb

1.  What are people mostly using AJAX for? Enhancing existing website, building a new website, building an application, replacing an old client/server application, etc?

2.  How much JavaScript did your team write for your AJAX-enabled website/web app (excluding third party Javascript libraries): under a hundred lines of Javascript, a few hundred lines , a few thousand lines, tens of thousands of lines or even more?

3.  Are you using mashup or do you plan to do some mashup, for which kind of project?

4.  Which tools (IDE) do people using for AJAX development?

5.  Do you still develop web 1.0 style applications, and why?

See next page for predictions from: Google's Christian Schalk, JackBe's John Crupi, Josh Gertzen of the ThinWire AJAX Framework, Kevin Hakman of TIBCO GI, and Andre Charland of Nitobi.

JOIN IN THE DISCUSSION: What would your questions be: please add them here.

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