We present in this paper the architecture and some implementation details of a web-based version of a Trivial game. Our implementation achieves such a high degree of interactivity between the players that they perceive the game as being played in real-time. More importantly, no plug-in or applet is used in the architecture of the system. These properties are achieved by means of a carefully designed architecture that uses AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) for data exchange. Using this approach, it is possible to develop any type of web-based collaborative software with few load on the web server. In the paper, we analyze traditional architectures for web-based applications and we show how our approach overcomes their limitations. Furthermore, we proof the efficiency of our approach by means of an empirical comparison. Key words: web application, user interface, AJAX, collaborative software, e-learning