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I'm pretty sure one next big thing will be web authentication API available from many well-known websites. Yahoo offers such thing, but only for Flickr users.

Today Google released their account authentication, but only for 'installed applications'. Web applications will follow sometime this month (hopefully).

What this means? They are offering web based authentication against accounts created on their servers. This way an user doesn't need to create a separate account on other site, they can authenticate using an account he already have. These open many possibilities, especially for big websites, which I'm almost sure at a point will open this authentication process to everyone who want to use, as long as they own user accounts. For users, it's much easier to maintain only a few accounts, available from many other places.

Something like this wanted to be passport.net from Microsoft, available mainly for different Microsoft sites.

I'll closely see how these will develop, because I'm very interested using these authentication APIs. [digg it]

Google has just released their web API for calendar (on Apr 20):

Google Calendar allows client applications to view and update calendar events in the form of Google data API ("GData") feeds. Your client application can use the Google Calendar data API to create new events, edit or delete existing events, and query for events that match particular criteria. 

There are a few steps to use Google Calendar, all described in their help files:

• Create an account
• Get magic cookie for your calendar, or feed URL (something like http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/userID/private-magicCookie/full)
• Request the feed, which returns a XML file;
• Post back an event or comments with a XML file.

We'll be back shortly with a full featured example using PHP.

I've just read Borland's Pawel Glowacki blog about beginnings of AJAX standarization.

On April 5th W3C published a working draft about XMLHttpRequest Object, the core of AJAX technology:

Abstract

This specification defines the XMLHttpRequest object, an API that provides some HTTP client functionality.

1. Introduction

This section is informative

The XMLHttpRequest object is an interface exposed by a scripting engine that allows scripts to perform HTTP client functionality, such as submitting form data or loading data from a remove Web site.

The XMLHttpRequest object is implemented today, in some form, by many popular Web browsers. Unfortunately the implementations are not completely interoperable. The goal of this specification is to document a minimum set of interoperable features based on existing implementations, allowing Web developers to use these features without platform-specific code. In order to do this, only features that are already implemented are considered. In the case where there is a feature with no interoperable implementations, the authors have specified what they believe to be the most correct behavior.

Future versions of this specification (as opposed to future drafts of this version) may add new features, after careful examination from browser developers and Web content developers.

This specification was originally derived from the WHAT WG's Web Applications 1.0 document. The authors acknowledge the work of the WHAT WG in documenting existing behavior.

So, AJAX is here to stay? Interesting stuff.