AJAX vs SOAP

For the most common denominator, the prospect of even a simple mash-up will set the ganglions a jingling (scary!). Google, having deprecated their SOAP search API are truly opening up slick content aggregation to the masses

Not the first though - Jetspeed opened up an AJAX API last year.

There is a lot of hand wringing and getting-knickers-in-a-knot over Googles strategic shift towards AJAX over SOAP with some (but not a lot) reason. Really, if changing a system to use AJAX instead of SOAP is such a big deal then maybe some refactoring is in order anyway?

Commercially the AJAX API makes sense for the vendor.

Technically the AJAX API (done properly offers as much power as would realistically be required by such applications as SOAP or remoting.

AJAX oriented dev tools are plentiful. this blew me away!

Watching this space closely