In his blog, A Brief History of AJAX, Aaron Swartz talks about the evolution of AJAX. Various vendors contributed to this effort. The tipping point came when Google used it for Google Maps and Gmail and when Jesse James Garrett coined the term AJAX.AJAX completely changed the browsing experience. Now vendors like Sun and TIBCO are jumping in with tools to build AJAX style applications. I just did a search on Google on AJAX applications, and got about 1.87 million hits. Also stumbled upon a link to the Top-10 AJAX applications posted in Sep, 2005.