There have been numerous articles over the last year on how the complementary nature of AJAX and service-orientation together are rapidly transforming the way in which we design, architect, deploy, and manage applications. The ramifications of this change impact nearly every aspect of business application development, from design conception, architectural planning, and implementation to unit testing and monitoring. New methodologies, tools, and infrastructure are now emerging as the industry evolves from the three-tier system concepts that have dominated the last decade on the Web into the Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) currently being implemented.
Let's look at several major areas of application development and architecture that are shifting from three-tier implementation styles to AJAX and SOA implementation styles to deliver more powerful, high-performance, extensible, manageable, and cost-effective solutions:
