Having been in immersed in C# and .NET Framework stuff lately I've been missing out on some of the developments that have been going on in the webbrowser. I remember programming an application for a customer in 2002 which was allowed to target Internet Explorer 4.0 and use JavaScript in combination with something called XmlDataIslands and XmlHttpRequests. Last year this technology has been given new life and is now commonly refered to as Ajax.

Tied in with the evolution of JavaScript is JSON: JavaScript Object Notation.

I like to think of JSON as object serialization for JavaScript objects, much like XmlSerialization is one of the corner pieces of .NET.

Scott Mitchell and Atif Aziz do a good job of explaining JSON in a little more detail .