AJAX

I read quite a bit about AJAX lately and was amazed by the simplicity and the efficiency that it brought about in web applications. However I realized that this was not something new. The most interesting thing in this is the reduction of postbacks leading to improvement in performance.  About a couple of years back, one of my friends had shown me a online chat demo available at http://www.volano.com which implemented something like this.  The primary reason of the hype for AJAX seems to be because big players like Google have implemented it (gmail)  and there are other ambitious projects like WebOffice.