1.    DZone (http://www.dzone.com) – an interesting content aggregator/online community that touches on all aspect of software development
2.    InfoQ (http://www.infoq.com) – good online community that covers lots of topics of interest to developers
3.    TheServerSide.com/TheServerSide.Net (http://www.theserverside.com and http://www.theserverside.net) – Two sites for J2EE and .NET web developers, respectively (the J2EE site is by far the most active)
4.    WebDeveloper.com (http://www.webdeveloper.com) – Sometimes the most general sites are the best, especially if you’re just getting started
5.    TechCrunch (http://www.techcrunch.com) – essentially a real-time view of the tech industry on a daily basis
6.    High Scalability (http://highscalability.com) – An almost daily discussion of the latest information on web app performance and scalability, with a heavy focus on real-world current case studies
7.    GigaOm (http://gigaom.com) – great overview of Silicon Valley (and, therefore, tech industry) goings-on
8.    Joel On Software (http://www.joelonsoftware.com) and StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com) – Joel Spolsky’s blog was once a top site but his posts seem to be growing more infrequent and personal in nature.  StackOverflow is a relatively new developer site he launched in 2008 that is helping take up the slack.
9.    Scott Hanselman’s ComputerZen.com (http://www.hanselman.com/blog) – Very high quality posts, primarily of interest to .NET developers
10.    Paul Graham Essays (http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html) – Regularly updated essays by a veteran programmer and entrepreneur
11.    The Daily WTF (http://thedailywtf.com) – A daily reminder of what not to do!
12.    Coding Horror (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog) – Great writing makes for entertaining reading on most occasions
13.    CodeBetter (http://codebetter.com) – At times very focused on .NET development but the majority of discussions are applicable to all serious developers
14.    Ajaxian (http://ajaxian.com) – a great blog/site devoted to JavaScript and all things AJAX
15.    ReadWriteWeb (http://www.readwriteweb.com) – good news site following all things of interest to web professionals
16.    Smashing Magazine (http://www.smashingmagazine.com) – more than just a web design site….includes information of use to all developers who care about how user’s interact with their work
17.    Signal vs. Noise (http://blogcabin.37signals.com) – In their words, a “design and usability blog” that at least once per week can force the reader to completely rethink the way they’ve been working or building apps.
18.    Dare Obasanja aka Carnage4Life (http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog) – Personal blog with lots of great thoughts on a wide variety of topics
19.    O’Reilly Radar (http://radar.oreilly.com) – Great inputs and thoughts from a wide variety of contributors, from entrepreneurs to lawyers to writers to programmers
20.    Reddit Programming (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming) – also called “Proggit” by some, the Programming node of the popular Reddit site has an endlessly updated stream of interesting links and pointers
21.    W3Schools (http://www.w3schools.com) – You really can’t go wrong with this massive collection of online web development tutorials
22.    CodeProject (http://www.codeproject.com) – Thousands of excellent snippets, extensions, and examples primarily of use to C++ and .NET developers
23.    Google Code (http://code.google.com) – While it’s possible to browse submitted projects, the search on this site is its best feature
24.    Agile Ajax (http://www.pathf.com/blogs/category/agileajax) – Despite the name, all content isn’t related to Agile and/or AJAX, not that there’s anything wrong with that
25.    ThinkVitamin (http://thinkvitamin.com) – A resource for web designers, developers, and entrepreneurs…their words, not mine!

It’s interesting to note that a large number of those sites are actually blogs run by individuals and/or companies.  We hope you’ll discover some new sites on that list that pay great dividends for you in the future!

We all know the old saying “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  This quote seems to perfectly sum up the current state of web application development.  User interfaces that maybe have required 10, 20, or even 50 mouse-clicks and subsequent page refreshes a few years back now look like rich Windows or Mac OS native screens – with nary a page refresh in sight as the user interacts with the UI.  The useful Ajax Patterns site (http://ajaxpatterns.org/Ajax_App) has a few questions you can ask of your site, in order to determine how extensive you will leverage this technology.  According to to the site, some items to think through include:
•    Will your app be “Ajax Deluxe” or “Ajax Lite”?  In other words – is your app going to resemble a functioning thick client application in its use of state management and usability?  If so, you may be facing an order-of-magnitude greater development effort, given the difficult of developing advanced AJAX functionality and ensuring it works across all necessary browsers.
•    How will you treat browsers with insufficient technologies for Ajax?  This may not apply to most intranet applications but definitely does apply to web-facing applications.  Are you prepared to turn users away and potentially use customers if they are not running a compliant browser?
•    How much processing power will be required of the browser?  This is a hidden issue that affects many apps that heavily leverage AJAX.  The fact is that JavaScript is horribly slow compared to server-side code execution, although recent releases of browsers such as Firefox 3.2 aim to improve JavaScript execution speed.  At any rate, if you are performing heavy DOM and data manipulation on the client, performance is something you need to plan for.

At the same time, in today’s marketplace, it is possible to use too little AJAX as well, particularly if you are offering features that visitors have come to expect will utilize AJAX functionality.  This might include online mapping, type-ahead lookup functionality in search boxes, and any sort of drill-down data exploration mechanisms.  If your site requires a page regen on the server after every mouse-click or submit and your competitors do not, you will be at a disadvantage and may end up losing customers to your competitors, thanks only to the user interface functionality alone.  The best recommendation at this point is to think creatively and identify a Top 3 or Top 5 areas in your app that could leverage AJAX in order to make your app more usable.  If those are successful and customers respond positively, look into carefully adding in AJAX functionality one feature at a time, as the UI demands it.