SAN FRANCISCO—Jesse James Garrett leaned on a stool at the front of the Web 2.0 Conference's AJAX workshop here Wednesday, sipping from a bowler glass and striking a Joycian figure with his goatee and horn-rimmed glasses.

The man who coined the term AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)—"In the shower I think, right, Jesse?" said Peter Merholz, a co-worker at Adaptive Path LLC—agreed with publisher Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0-as-paradigm-shift argument .

"The applications 2.0 revolution isn't a technological revolution at all, it's a revolution in our understanding of how to use these technologies better," Garrett said.

To wit, the panel didn't discuss any revolutionary business models. Instead, they spoke about how the AJAX-powered Web 2.0 revolution (or evolution, if you prefer) is changing existing business models and Web sites for the better.

Garrett said that Google, for example, "applied these technologies to problems people thought had been solved," such as how best to handle e-mail and maps.

What got everybody's attention about Google's applications is that the company figured out how to deploy these new technologies without compromising technology.

The Web 1.0 party line was always, "Sure, we can make this app look cool if the user has Internet Explorer or if they have the right plug-in." Today, that concern has almost been obviated.

But Garrett and Merholz stressed that collaboration between designers and developers is key. Whereas it was very difficult to hang yourself with HTML alone, today's technologies require greater teamwork to pull off.

But where's the business case and the ROI (return on investment) with AJAX-powered apps? The panel, which included Joe Chung of Allurent, Inc., Evan Goldberg from NetSuite Inc. and Peter Kaminski of Socialtext Inc., didn't have a clear answer.

"The business owners … understand the technology now and have become the drivers," Chung said. "But to really understand the ROI, you have to bring in statisticians and do a controlled study. Your hunches aren't good enough anymore."

Read a roundup here of the current top 10 Web 2.0 apps for the office.

Chung demonstrated Allurent Inc.'s shopping cart application, which took advantage of Flash to improve upon the typically frustrating online shopping experience.

Merholz added, "Right now the business case is largely around the experience. It's going to have to get more finalized, and pretty soon, to drive adoption."

Of course, there are roadblocks to widespread AJAX adoption. One of the largest is the lack of development tools available to AJAX developers.

"I think the lack of development tools, yeah, that's a roadblock," Garrett said. "But the market opportunity is just too big. I think that if you're in an organization that has a real strong tech culture that goes all the way up to the top level, there's going to be some hesitancy to do anything with JavaScript. They're going to need to be convinced."

Part of the reason, the panelists agreed, was that JavaScript was much abused, and thus almost universally maligned, after its debut.

So where does the business opportunity exist right now? Everywhere. AJAX is an evolutionary approach to technology because it allows developers to do redo basically every application on the Web, as Google did with Gmail and Google Maps.

Click here to read about Google's Weblog search.

Garrett and Merholz debuted the pre-alpha of their site traffic analyzer, MeasureMap. Interestingly, the application combines AJAX techniques and Flash technology.

"Flash is definitely one of these technologies that has proven itself," Garrett said. "Flash certainly has better development tools than JavaScript developers have available to them."

Garrett added that Flash is great at data visualization and direct manipulation of data. What's more, applications like MeasureMap and technologies like sIFR demonstrate that Flash can be used without the presence of a Flash UI. Flash and AJAX can talk to each other, and the user never even has to know.

The future of AJAX technologies may be influenced, in part, by how organizations accommodate the disparate Flash and JavaScript development cultures.

Meanwhile, several companies wanting to be part of the Web 2.0 evolution made announcements today.

Attentiontrust.org announced the Attention Trust Recorder, a Firefox extension that records browsing history and saves it both to your desktop and to the Attention Trust service. You can then choose which parts of that history you want to share with service providers.

Flock announced that it is expanding its beta group from a few hundred to a few thousand new users today as well. Interested parties can sign up at flock.com.

And Zevents announced its social event manager/calendar today, just in time to hear Yahoo Inc. announce that it has acquired upcoming.org.

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