I came across a nifty site today in my morning travels. Joel Parrish, a young high school student in southern California, has posted an interesting demo/proof of concept that uses AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) to provide a real time language translator. His demo with contextual advertisements really drives the point home. This is a great demonstration of the power of AJAX.

http://parish.ath.cx/

While I think AJAX is quickly becoming one of “those words” that will invariably get overused (can you say “Web 2.0″?), AJAX offers a tremendous amount of flexibility to the developer, and a host of conveniences for end users.

Wikipedia’s coverage of AJAX

The AJAX concept has single-handedly re-invigorated Javascript as a core competency.

Cheers.