NYT on RIAs

The New York Times' James Fallow ran a piece yesterday on Rich Internet Apps, which I found good as a market summary but somewhat uneven on the specifics. Although he claimed Adaptive Path's Jesse James Garret coined the term 'AJAX' for the combination of client-side javascript and XML for asynchronous page updates, Fallow also associates the term 'AJAX' rather erroneously with the larger, technology-agnostic 'Rich Internet Applications' label and discussion- which does not necessarily suggest a method of delivery, outside of shucking the traditional request/response cycle of old-school web applications. I personally feel it's dangerous to be equating AJAX (or Flash/Flex, for that matter) as a definitive technology for enabling said 'Rich Experiences' online- but outside of that nitpicking, a good read nonetheless for all the high-level points (thanks to Simon Horwith's blog for the pointer).