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Well, more than a few people have picked up on the various articles floating around regarding Ajax and scalability. Thanks to Michael Mahemoff for reading my piece and reposting it (check the comments). Stuart Halloway over on Relevance also picked up on the thread (alas he didn’t notice my commentary…) and made a great point – the server vendors win in this game! Interestingly, this is the second time in less than a week that I’ve read a variant of this quote (though it’s not attributed in Stuart’s article, according to wikipedia, it’s Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut).

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.

Anyway, good call on the server vendors – they should all be lining up behind Ajax (is it a coincidence that IBM leads the Open Ajax project?) Dave Johnson also gets into the mix with Scaling AJAX. I liked his allusion to Spider Man but he made a great I was really glad to see him refer to the MacRumors post on handling the Macworld keynote (see the overview as well).

It took a few days, but seems like this issue has gotten some visibility!
Update:

Scott over on the Zimbra blog has a great take on Ajax and scaling. I particularly like referring to Ajax apps as “husky” as opposed to thin or thick and he’s dead on with this comment:

In terms of its broader application architecture, the Web platform looks a lot more like a mainframe application: Yes, the 3270 green screen is replaced by a far richer browser and hypertext mark-up, but more of the UI and virtually all of the business logic (modulo Javascript field validation) is done on the server.

At one point, I had a CIO that called our web apps “lipstick on a pig” – we were just webifying mainframe apps… That said, most of my customers really enjoyed not having a character limit to their screens!