Microsoft has unveiled its official Atlas technology branding for AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programming on ASP.Net, and will make the software available sooner than planned. AJAX enables developers to create more interactive Web sites and is powers the functionality of sites such as Flickr and Google Mail. The company hopes to ship its Atlas technologies around the end of 2006, as opposed to next year.

Previously, Microsoft used the code name ASP.Net "Atlas" to refer to multiple components of technologies designed to assist Web developers with AJAX-style development, a Microsoft representative said in an e-mail. Now, the server-side Atlas functionality, which integrates with ASP.Net, is called ASP.Net 2.0 AJAX Extensions.

Client-side functionality, which integrates ASP.Net 2.0 AJAX Extensions and other back-end platforms such as PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) or ColdFusion, is called Microsoft AJAX Library. This features the client-side JavaScript library.

The Atlas Control Toolkit, meanwhile, is now called the ASP.Net AJAX Control Toolkit.

Microsoft had planned to ship Atlas with the next version of Visual Studio, code-named "Orcas," which is due next year. By offering production-ready versions of ASP.Net 2.0 AJAX Extensions and the AJAX Library this year, enterprise customers will be able to take Atlas applications into production with fully supported APIs, Microsoft said.