The Live Access Server (LAS) is a well-established Web-application software system for display and analysis of geo-science data sets. The software, which can be downloaded and installed by anyone, gives data providers an easy way to establish services for their on-line data holdings so their users can make plots, create and download sub-sets in a variety of formats, and compare and analyze data.

Modern web applications are taking advantage of novel applications of web technology – the so called Web 2.0 revolution. In this presentation we discuss our experiences adding AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) services to the next generation of the Live Access Server. In order to build clients which give the user the utmost in responsiveness we had to carefully consider the factoring and the implementation of the services that will feed the client program the information it needs. In conjunction with the discussion of software infrastructure issues related to Live Access Server development, we will provide an overview of the latest advances in the capabilities and configurability of the Live Access Server itself.

We recently re-factored our server architecture for other purposes. The new architecture is faster at extracting and processing configuration information needed to address each request. The speed of this re-factored architecture has meant that we can use many of the underlying configuration processing classes to implement services for an AJAX client. We believe this retooling has been successful and that others will benefit from our experience.