Thursday, March 10th, 2005
Welcome!
Category: Ajax
Ajaxian.com isn’t about exotic new web technologies. It’s about exploring how some of our old friends (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript) can be used to do very interesting things that for the past few years we’ve been telling our employers can’t be done in a conventional browser.
The core tool at the center of these new tricks is XMLHttpRequest, a JavaScript object that enables easy asychronous requests to be made without a page reload; such requests return XML. This technique has been called ajax (asychronous JavaScript and XML).
After years of focusing on server-side frameworks to keep life entertaining, its great fun to be innovating on the client once again.
Thanks for joining us.
37.4 rating from 34 votes
XMLHttpRequest has been around for a while, it’s not something new.
What Google does is taken as something ‘new’ and ‘inovative’. Imagine if Microsoft comes up with Microsoft maps using ActiveX, the whole world wide web will curse it.
Ben mentioned right in the post that its nothing new, just a new name and a lot of interest around it due to big players like Google using it.
So who cares how long it has been around, lets just see how we can use it to create better sites.
Sure, it isn’t new, but I think the good news is that google, et al have made it legit simply by embracing it. It’s perception, but it has a lot of weight.
Scripting the DOM, lazily loading content in the background (timers/xhr) and the rest of the collection of the ‘ajax’ bag of tricks can get you a lot of richness… now with less guilt or fear.
This is a *very* positive thing, imho.
I’m interested to see what server-side support appears here. I know that JSF will add some in-place-update (ipu/xhr) support, and I presume Tapestry, Struts, RoR, etc will as well.
I don’t mean this as spam or competition, just wanted to let you know that I’ve started a forum focusing on AJAX @ http://www.ajaxchange.com
Check out my site on AJAX at http://www.ajaxmatters.com. I look forward to your suggestions.
Anyone actually know how “AJAX” is pronounced? Is it like “Ay Jacks” or “Eye Acks”? Or is it something else again?
Who was the greatest comedian in the Bible?
Samson–he brought the house down.
testing the comments