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What AJAX is good for...

I don't like AJAX really much. I think in most cases it's useless sweetness, that nobody needs in a web app (not to mention that all that Web2 ranting is completely ridiculous). Anyway, Tobias Struckmeier (a fellow eZ employee and user group mate) invited me to use Google Calendar a while ago. I did not try it out until now, but since I was searching for a good calendar application anyway, I just logged in (using my Gmail account) and played a bit with it.

I have to say: I'm really amazed. First of all, I just dragged my mouse on the default calendar and it instantly created an event for me, with the timespan I just selected. So far so good, that's JavaScript, surely a useful feature, but easy to implement. After that, I discovered the "add other calendars" function. It allowed me, to add public calendars of my friends, to display their activities directly in my calendar. Since I only know of Tobias having a Google Calendar, yet, I checked some more options and added calendars for German and Norwegian public holidays to mine. Cool, now I know, when I will have free time and when my Norwegian colleagues have!

So far, I was already convinced, that I will give Google Calendar a chance and use it, because it also offers you to aggregate your calendars via RSS to any destination you like, so I won't have to log in all the time. I decided to check for more external calendars and invited some friends to use the app. While typing the email address of a friend, a nice JavaScript auto-completion drop-down appeared and showed me his email address. Google Calendar fetched the list from the auto-complete list of my Gmail account. Nice! So far so good, I started adding my upcoming events to the calendar. After adding an event in Frankfurt (Main), I occasionally clicked on that event again and a nice JavaScript bubble showed me some event details. Nothing special, right? But there was also a link to a "map" in there, which opened me a new window to Google Maps, showing the area where the event will take place.

It seems to me, that Google is really on the right way, supplying a really useful set of web applications, interacting with each others and using really cool AJAX stuff for presenting an absolutely convenient interface. This system is really cool! :) Wanna keep track of my upcoming events? Here you are!