"Having been involved with the development one of the first enterprise-oriented AJAX development environments (not called AJAX back then) called PowerSite while at Powersoft," writes IBM's Bob Zurek (pictured) in his blog, "our focus was front and center on DHTML with support for multiple back end runtimes targeted at the then current app servers such as ASP, Kiva, NetDynamics, and Jaquar."

"One of the killer components in the offering was called the DataWindow," Zurek continues. "The DataWindow is still, to this day, considered the 'killer app' as a component for building rich data oriented applications, and is still part of the PowerBuilder development environment offered by Sybase."

Powersoft was acquired by Sybase in 1994. Zurek notes that the DataWindow first emerged in PowerBuilder 1.0 "and was a catalyst for creating some of the most data intensive client server applications at that time."

He then makes an interesting assertion:

"AJAX frameworks currently lack a killer component like the DataWindow. Developers spend way to much time dealing with all the complexities that are easily handled by a component like the DataWindow. Over time, a rich DataWindow like component will emerge as part of an AJAX framework and I suspect that this will be the framework that everyone will want for simplifying data intensive AJAX applications."