Ajax is one of the hippest technologies around and perhaps the best way to understand its improtance is to get an idea of what you can achieve with it, what it can do for your web development. Principally, Ajax can help you develop web pages and websites that function and respond like desktop applications. The Ajax technology achieves this by working away in the background, grabbing data from a server and then displaying it as it’s needed. As internet access speeds continue to increase, there will come a time when the user will not be able to perceive any difference between the performance of a web application and that of regular desktop software.