Michael Morrison - Ajax Construction Kit: Building Plug-and-Play Ajax Applications

• tag (HTML)

tag (XML)
loading
images dynamically[See .]

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tag

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tag
rating systems [See .]
real-time validation [See .]
Really Simple Syndication [See .]
XMLHttpRequest object
News Feeder application
running Ajax Construction Kit live CD

, tag (HTML)
user interfaces

Maybe you couldn't care less where Ajax came from, but just in case you do, I thought a little history lesson might be worthwhile. By understanding a bit more about the origins of Ajax, you'll hopefully be more capable of assessing the role it will play in the future of Web development. It's a very exciting technology, but one that is in many ways still in an exploratory state. So where exactly did Ajax come from and where is it headed? Let's find out.

When you get right down to it, Ajax is really just a term used to describe a particular application of existing technologies. This particular application has been around for a few years, but not until February of 2005 was given a catchy name. The man responsible for the name is Jesse James Garrett, who needed a more efficient way to describe a Web solution to a client of his employer, Adaptive Path. The name Ajax hit Garrett one day in the shower, and it stuck. People began thinking that Ajax was actually an acronym (AJAX) that stood for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, but this isn't entirely the case. Although the name Ajax does in fact refer to a development approach involving asynchronous JavaScript and XML, the word "Ajax" isn't strictly an acronym.

Surprisingly enough, the road leading up to Garrett's catchy name can be traced back to Microsoft's Remote Scripting technology, which was officially introduced in 1998 in Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4. A functional application that utilized Microsoft's Remote Scripting technology was Outlook Web Access, which was certainly pioneering for its time. Taking a step back a few years earlier, the iframe (Internet Explorer) and layer (Netscape Navigator) elements supported the asynchronous loading of Web content as far back as 1996. The iframe and layer elements in combination with crafty JavaScript coding ushered in the notion of Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, which was popular for several years prior to the advent of Ajax techniques.

The true birth of Ajax took place in 2000 when Microsoft added the XMLHTTPRequest object to Internet Explorer 5. It still took a few years for the technology to mature to a point where it could be used consistently, and even then it took a groundbreaking application for everyone to truly see the power of Ajax.