Well, my on going quest to find the holy grail of AJAX tutorials has not improved much in the last week. I have tried working my way through Pragmatic Ajax and I have tried an array of online examples. All to no avail. I would be great if I was looking to re-invent Google Earth or if I was running a stock control package but (at least, at the moment ) I am not so they are all pretty much pointless leads.

Is it honestly too much to ask for a sensible tutorial which will explain in human readable terms what is actually so good about this all singing, all dancing web 2.0 we keep hearing about? Apparently so. Using the wonders of the internet, I did a technorati search on “AJAX Tutorial” (http://technorati.com/search/AJAX%20tutorial) and the results were enlightening.

Sadly, they were not all that good for producing inspiring, educational, tutorials.

One of the “better” ones there was http://www.symfony-project.com/content/book/page/sortable.html – which, like most Ajax tutorials presents a reall world example of what you can do with the technology. Now, this is a good tutorial. It is well written and as interesting & engaging as any of the others out there.

Sadly, where it all falls down for me is the time:benefit scenario. As you can see, this tutorial shows you how to use Ajax to create a cool list that you can re-order as you see fit. Wow. Visit the site, it is good, and check out the amount of code required to achieve this goal.

Now it is wonderful that you can do this sort of thing with Ajax. It looks cool. It is “high tech” and will impress people in meetings. However, what is its actual purpose? Does it have a reason? Why on Earth would you justify the amount of coding time to get this into a webpage when, all it does is reorder a list. I am amazed. Flash has done this in half the time for an eternity.

Am I missing something or is “Web 2.0” genuinely smoke and mirrors without even having mirrors? Is there any reason to spend the time and effort getting to grips with the techniques involved? Why do job advertisments and contracts already specify understanding and skill of “Web 2.0” as a requirement?

Has the world gone mad?