NEW YORK. Ajax and RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) are often all about the 'WOW', the front end graphical dynamic interface.
In a crowded AjaxWorld session, Andi Gutmans CTO of Zend reminded Ajax developers that you also need a backend behind Ajax - a backend that Gutmans hopes will be PHP based.

Gutmans spent much of his AjaxWorld session talking about the benefits of the newly released Zend Framework 1.5 and how it can help Ajax developers. Zend Framework alone isn't quite enough though as Gutmans demonstrated a proof of concept application that provided a push (as opposed to pull) mechanism for content delivery.

In a nutshell what his test application involved was a seperate Comet server as well as the LightHTTPd webserver in order to create a dynamic Ajax push application. The Comet specification is a low latency continuous communication channel between a browser based application and the server. With Ajax where users are continuously connected to a data stream, Gutmans commented that Comet is a very important technology to have. For his proof of concept Zend developed a rough Comet implementation in PHP, though there is much work still to be done.

One of the key deployment challenges of Ajax in Gutmans' view is the latency issue since Ajax activity requires many browser to server roundtrips to deliver data.

So, what is the key to improving Ajax and paving the way for the next generation of Ajax apps?

"I think this year you'll see more work done on the server sisde as opposed to just the pretty side of RIA," Gutmans said.