Late last month, we launched version 2.0 of XM Radio Online. Geoff does a good break down on the technologies we used for this version of the player over at his blog.

Under the guidance of XM Radio, Chopping Block’s goal was to make XM Radio Online completely accessible and compliant, making it great for screen readers! We also needed to make sure that we could display currently playing song information, allow all available channels to be easy to find, and lastly, to add some usable enhancements to this version, we wanted to offer a few channel presets for users to add/remove at will. The result was a beautiful combination of XML, XHTML, CSS and Javascript all working together. This type of programming is also known as Ajax. Additionally we also used Flash to handle the song information that must be updated continuously and we utilized Windows Media Player 9 to stream the radio to the user.

If you’re interested in promoting Ajax to your developers you can show them this great essay I found from Adaptive Path on Ajax and exactly what it entails:

Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:
• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.

There are a few other popular sites out there that use Ajax:
Google Maps
Google Suggest