From Desktop to Browser Platform: Office Application Suite with Ajax

Web applications have usually been less responsive and pro-vided poorer user experience compared to traditional desktop applications. World Wide Web was not originally developed for highly interactive applications and that is why the client-server interaction used in web has not been ideal for highly interactive applications. Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a set of technologies utilizing standard browser tech-nologies to overcome the traditional problems with web ap-plications. It provides means for client-side event handling, incremental user interface modification and asynchronous data transfer between a client and a server. Use of Ajax has allowed new types of applications to be brought from desk-top platform to web platform. One class of these new web applications is presented by Google Docs suite which im-plements the conventional office applications: word proces-sor, spreadsheets and presentations for web browser. Google Docs is used in this paper as an example of new kind of web applications made possible by Ajax. Google Docs is pro-vided as a hosted service which means that it shares some benefits and drawbacks of other applications provided as ser-vice. These benefits and drawbacks are discussed in the pa-per. Also the overall functionality of Google Docs is ex-plained