I have to say that I'm impressed. Last night when I got home from Volleyball (yes, we won both matches, thank you ;)), a friend pinged me to talk about AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). As I always tell people when I talk about sIFR, "I am not the JavaScript guru," but man, maybe I should be. The recent methods being used open up a whole new world of possibilities for web page interactivity. (No, I won't get into the criticism here.)

Take the new MXNA 2.0 as an example. Though they had done some cool AJAX stuff with the reports already, Christian and Mike have really outdone themselves with their proof of concept using the MXNA 2.0 Category Feed Reports. Click on a category on the right -- like Dreamweaver -- watch as the feeds below load without your page reloading. Now click on a feed, like CMXtraneous, and watch how the chart simply morphs into the new feed. See how the posts below it change? Did you notice that you never once reloaded the page? How sexy is that?

Christian explains better than I, "...notice how both the Flash chart and the posts below the chart update without the page refreshing. When you click on a feed name, we're using JavaScript to pass data into the Flash movie which then updates itself using the MXNA web services. When you click on a bar in the chart, we pass data from the Flash chart into JavaScript to load the selected post at the top of the list." Wow.

It's a new sphere of Flash/AJAX interaction and it can lead to some exciting possibilities. As Flash and JavaScript uses continue to evolve, it makes me wonder what I'm missing. Looks like it might be time to expand my skills yet again. (Do we ever know enough?)

Macromedia released version 5.0 of Breeze and Breeze Live today, with some nifty new features being announced. The only problem? Actually finding a complete list of everything new. (Look for a full review of the new version later this week at Community MX.)

After a bit of digging I was finally able to come up with a Flash Paper document that details all the new features, of which there are many. It appears that much of what has been done is targeted at the corporate world, including better participant tracking, integration with LDAP to make the creation of accounts much easier, and some new pricing options to allow for larger meetings with more participants. I'm not surprized at these changes based on how Breeze is currently being used and who is using it.

You can see a full recap of all the new features at the Breeze 5 Product Overview. (Flash Paper format.)