If you think, Ajax is Cool, wait until next generation browsers are released. The future 2D/3D web applications will certainly Blow You Away.

Site Map There are many wonderful technologies emerging (e.g. Microsoft’s XAML, Adobe’s MXML/Flex/Flash, Mozilla’s XUL, SVG and X3D), which unfortunately are many times more complex than DHTML/JavaScript (e.g. Ajax methods) to use and build data driven real-time applications (e.g. Games, GIS and real-time simulations). However they offer great flexibility, fine-grained control, capabilities and features to build superior 2D/3D components to use in graphics intensive applications that Rock.

Fortunately, the complexity will go away and even junior programmer with little or no JavaScript experience can create great real-time games or simulations than possible on the desktop GUI platforms.  Please don’t believe any of this stuff, until you check it out yourself (It is not a Rocket Science):

http://cbsdf.com/misc_docs/why-gui-api.htm
http://cbsdf.com/misc_docs/gui-api-brief.htm
http://cbsdf.com/technologies/proof-online-GUI-API.htm

Pioneer-soft, A startup, invented a method to create reusable GUI widgets (a higher level reusable building blocks for JSP/.NET developers to eliminate the complexity), which can be used to build 2D/3D real-time applications such as Games, GIS, Simulations and Remote Command & Control systems.

An interesting SVG tutorial to develop an Airplane Widget (an example reusable building block): http://cbsdf.com/technologies/GUI-Class3.htm

A sample application that uses the Airplane widget (Please be patient until the flights start moving. Click on the flights and radio buttons): http://cbsdf.com/technologies/building-air-traffic-monitoring.htm

This above simple process can be used to build GUI Widgets for any 2D/3D components. Then many instances of each of the Widgets (i.e. Classes) can be used to build an online application. See some old examples:
http://cbsdf.com/technologies/demo-links/demo-links.htm

Absolutely there is no reason left today, why online applications cannot leapfrog the desktop GUI platforms to build graphics intensive 2D/3D applications. In fact, it will cost far less to build online applications compared to comparable desktop applications.

Note: The Online GUI-API is first part of the inventions. If you like this part, you will love "Loosely Coupled" Component based software development paradigm, which is many times more useful (but may be bit more hard).