One can only hope that the "AJAX Moment" will be brief indeed. It is at best a kludge to squeeze a bit more life out of the browser paradigm by faking the afflicted into thinking that the browser architecture is a rich client. It is an egregious waste of server capacity and bandwidth as well as a software maintenance nightmare. If you need a rich client, then use one. There are lots of options. Those who try to extend the old browser architecture with AJAX are like those in the Biblical proverb "who put new wine into old wineskins." The old unsupple skins burst and the wine is wasted. The current browser archtecture is like an unsupple wineskin. It's been stretched as far as it really can. Let's do it right and take what we've learned and get some "new wineskins" instead of foolishly trying to extend the life of the old ones.

IBM's Bill Higgins has a nicely written article on the concepts of REST and Ajax, looking at Java Servlet's HttpSession API. Here's the link: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/wa-ajaxarch/