If your boss is so controlling that he won't even let you hear things without his permission, there is no way he will ever listen to your input on anything that matters. It's time to find another job.

I don't think many of the people who commented here have actually used AJAX. One person's complaint was "Explain to me how creating more HTTP requests by using AJAX is going to decrease your database load." The answer is two part: 1) It decreases overall load & bandwidth used by reducing the number of full pages sent. Not having to re-render a page significantly reduces the number of queries required; 2) It reduces database load in particular by running a greater number of low-load/complexity queries, instead of a lesser number of high-load/complexity queries (joins). I've never personally had my Norton or Avast prevent me from doing any AJAX. In fact, I've never even heard of this, and I've done a lot of AJAX and a lot of cross-browser testing. It's "just another request" as far as the browser is concerned. Are you talking about the flag Internet Explorer raises when you use AJAX to request "off site" content? (i.e., using AJAX to request data from a domain different from the one on which the javascript is hosted). There is a *very* simple workaround for this. The solution is to route remote AJAX requests through a local request forwarder. All it does is receive your AJAX request, and forward the request. You get the result back via your request forwarder. Voila!