Rich clients are not a revolution, but an evolution of technology, including AJAX. Today we look to leverage dynamic behavior and deliver that experience directly to the end user, aggregating Web services within an interface that appears as much like a native application as possible.

As stated above, rich clients employing AJAX provide capabilities that thin clients are not able to provide, including windowing features and data navigation control such as buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, toggles and palettes. They are also able to integrate content, communications, and platform-independent application interfaces for distribution through emerging SOAs. The rich client using AJAX becomes a Web services/SOA terminal of sorts, allowing applications to communicate and even execute on one another within a distributed environment.

This is great news for those of us who are developing Web services or implementing an SOA. With the use of rich clients, suddenly those services have a much higher value. Indeed, you can mix and match services within a rich client to create some very valuable applications. Perhaps, someday, the use of static and dynamic HTML and heavyweight protocols such as HTTP will not be the primary way we view distributed applications. Rich clients give us the ability to view applications that look and act like native client programs, albeit they are running remotely. That would be step in the right direction, and the reason AJAX is so important to SOA.