I recently attended a technical conference about AJAX and .NET. We all know that AJAX has been around in some shape or another for more than six years. The nature of AJAX is no different than an applet calling back to its home. Instead of a Java applet, though, you’re just writing a JavaScript “applet” and hitting the dynamic rendering engine of the web server. What we’ve all forgotten is why we stopped creating fat clients and put the CPU burden back on the server. First of all, back in the 90s, nobody had gigahertz computers, so we all lamented the slow speed of a fat client. Then there were compatibility issues with the browsers and their implementations of Java. Then there was the problem of a chatty network, where your applet produced lots of little requests that bogged down your thin pipe. The Java applet was nice because you could combine your requests into a larger payload and make more efficient use of your bandwidth. AJAX doesn’t do that. Why is a chatty network so bad?...