Mathematica to go Web 2.0

The O'Reilly School of Technology (a partnership between the University of Illinois and O'Reilly Media) will begin offering online courses using a new AJAX-based implementation of Mathematica. According to an article on the O'Reilly School's website,

[The Web 2.0 version of Mathematica] will have extremely high fidelity with the Mathematica software. The only difference will be that users will be reading, typing and executing commands on a web page version that connects to a server via AJAX. Mathematica output is rendered real-time via AJAX and CSS.

Wolfram Research's Mathematica has long been at the forefront of computer-based mathematical education. The advent of a browser-based version of Mathematica will provide access to the software for a much broader base of students since its considerable hardware requirements will be handled server-side.