With the development of new frameworks like Ajax, cloud computing is easily done with a standard internet browser. Although Ajax itself is new,one of the main components, Javascript, is not. Ajax really just sends and requests data via Javascript. That said, it’s a lot easier to use Ajax than to do the same thing from scratch.

Building onto this is Google Web Toolkit(http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/). It allows developers to write websites and services in a Java-like syntax and compile into a proprietary bytecode. That bytecode is then used to generate all the Ajax code needed to create a slick website. So you go from Java to Ajax to Javascript. Some developers may feel that this gives you less control over your web app which may be true but it also severely cuts down on your development time. This allows a high school grad to spend less time coding in his mom’s basement and more more time thinking up the next big thing.

Another technology worth mentioning is Windows Azure(http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx). I haven’t looked into it too much or read reviews about it but it’s Microsoft’s new development kit for developing web services. I don’t know much about it’s features compared to other web technologies but as a Microsoft product, you’ll be seeing more and more services developed using it.