At the ZendCon developers conference yesterday, which is held at the same Santa Clara convention centre than DiskCon - making it a lot easier to cover both events -, I've attended part of the State of Ajax presentation by Ben Galbraith (pictured).

For the Ajaxian co-founder, and now part of the Mozilla developer team, Ajax applications are getting really close, both in terms of speed (thanks to faster Javascript interpreters inside of Web browsers) and graphical user-interface (GUI) capabilities that rivals desktop solutions like Adobe's Flash or Microsoft' Silverlight.

Galbraith also praised the rapid improvements of CSS (for GUI), HTML (with version 5) and Gears whose "goal is to look at the standards like HTML 5 and see where standards are headed and give developers a version that they can use today".

"HTML 5 is addressing the pain points that we have. CSS is getting better and the idea is that for those browsers that haven't implemented these improvements Gears can actually step in and provide the solution until it happens", Galbraith says.

Galbraith also mentioned the HTML Canvas tags that provide native support for vector graphics in Safari, Firefox and Opera, as well as IE through Google's Javascript/VML-emulation. The advantage of Canvas is that it can blend with HTML to provide a more seamless experience for the designer, engineer and end-user as it doesn't require the end-user to download, install and maintain a browser plug-in like Flash.

"Layout is arguably one of the biggest pain points for web developers today and there are some examples of layout today on the Web that are handle through Javascript, so you don't have to deal with CSS, with bizarre layout conventions [he gave a demo of Google's Image Search site that uses Canvas]".

Within one year, Web Apps user interface will rival Apple's Cocoa in Mac OS X

"You can see a future where browsers give us a dramatically better rendering that rivals desktop environments like Cocoa in OS X with dramatically easier layout and that would create a fantastically productive environment. And it's easy to predict that that's where all is ended. HTML 5 and CSS are going to make Web development a little easier over time and Gears is going to bring that to us a even faster. But probably within a year, we'll see more and more environments radically change the way we do AJAX and Web development today and creates something that is just a whole lot more fun".

Finally for Galbraith, "what's cool about AJAX is that, it came from being this little hack for getting data dynamically to having a really great programming model with great remoting, with extensive customisation vectors... cloud deployment... components really easy to use... great effects... there's a great mobile story, we can now integrate with the desktop and we know have some state of the art plug-ins".