News.com is reporting on an upcoming toolkit to assist in the creation of Ajax applications.
It sounds from the description that it'll be a Javascript wrapper around the existing XMLHTTPRequest functions; I doubt it will be more useful than Ajax.NET but it's interesting nonetheless.
This bit's funny though:
"People who do (AJAX development) are rocket scientists," Fitzgerald said. "In some ways, this papers over the mess that is JavaScript development. It's easy-to-build 'spaghetti' code."
That's Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's Manager of Platform Technologies (?). Does he seriously believe that Javascript lends itself to messy development? Prototype, Mozilla (who use JS extensively in their apps and extension system), and Jeremy seem to disagree.
But the irony is that Microsoft's current big web technology, ASP.NET, can lead to spaghetti code of the highest order. With templated controls and the absurd event model, ASP.NET can be a minefield in the wrong hands... just like Javascript.
So I think Charles has chosen his words wrongly in this circumstance. It will be interesting to see who picks up on this.