Lately I’ve been working on a few side projects written in node js, and have been using socket.io quite heavily. In fact I made a conscious decision to use sockets exclusively rather than ajax. Now, truth be told, behind the scenes ajax will still be used on any browser that does not support html5 sockets, but the point is that there are no explicit ajax services in server code.

If you listen closely you can hear the death knoll of ajax ringing. The promise of html5 web sockets on the client in combination with server side technologies such as socket.io (node js) and signalR (asp.net), will eventually shift the paradigm of how web pages communicate with back-end servers.

Everyone talks about html5 as a flash and silverlight killer. I believe that we’ll soon start to hear more developers talk about it as an ajax killer as well. Of course this will never be as sensational as the flash/silverlight argument, but will be true all the same.