>I would say the bust had no substantial impact on technology side of thing.

I think that it did, because it focused development efforts of companies that remained in business. Many failed dot-coms should have failed before the bust, but they kept acting like working businesses as long as they had capital available. They diluted markets, absorbed development talent by offering equity and large salaries, and in general distorted the whole industry.

After the bust, the technologies and idea that got attention/effort/built up were the ones with a solid foundation, not the pipe dreams.

Ajax was made technically possible by Microsoft XHR and IE5. It took Gmail and gmaps to bring this to wide attention.

Yes. I remember people (including me) being a bit amazed by the web version of Outlook that first made use of it. Technically MS introduced this functionality in IE5 in 1999, as an ActiveX control.

It was a Microsoft-only thing for a while though, until Mozilla/Safari/Opera implemented their own versions. That took a few years IIRC.

At any rate, Gmail was what made the world really take notice of what AJAX could do.

For the record there where a lot of people that where doing the same thing before the XHR object, they where just using an iframe and polling to get the data which was usually an HTML snippet or XML. They would construct the url for data with JS in the main frame, change the url of the hidden frame to point to a different CGI script, get the data and read it into JS variables. It was just that none of them got the exposure of Gmail or Outlook web. Now in saying that iFrame polling was a huge hack and a major PITA but it worked. IIRC one of the major CGI/Perl chat apps used this hack to update the web chat window.