Thursday 23 June 2005 — This is more than 19 years old. Be careful.
In case you aren’t in the web design field, or have been living under a rock, there’s this implementation technique called Ajax, an acronym for Asynchronous Javascript And Xml. Google Maps is its best-known showcase, providing a great fluid experience that does all sorts of things that sites like Mapquest and MSN Maps can’t do (dragging, resizing, etc).
Now we have Ajaxian Blog, a blog devoted to all things Ajax. Basically, Ajax is inspiring a renaissance in the construction of web applications, and Ajaxian is helping to track it all.
The current explosion in Ajax use is a bit of a mystery to me. I understand why people are jazzed about it, but why did it take so long? The tools have been lying around for ages. I worked at Blue Ripple where Mark Judd and Mike McGlynn were basically doing all of this stuff in 2000-2001. Is there something new that enables this explosion of use, or was the time just right for everyone to catch on? Maybe Google showing it off to such good effect has lit a fire under everyone. I don’t mean to sound like an old grouch, I just wonder if I missed something: is there something truly new about Ajax?
Comments
But even a curmudgeon has to admit that the Google implementations (GMail, Google Maps) are particularly sweet.
The reason why it died out after 1999-2000 was the popularity of IE. I had no problems building crazy asynchronous DHTML shit with NN4, but damned if it could work cross-browser at that time.
I think everyone simply gave up and reverted to simpler HTML (or Flash) as DHTML had a tendency to crash browsers if it worked at all. Nobody noticed that "web 2.0" was a reality until Google showed us that this stuff is actually relatively stable and cross-browser now.
Specifically, it's the fact that back then you had to make sure your sites worked in Netscape and IE - so anything that was IE only was a big no-no.
Now you have to make sure they work in Firefox and IE so anything that works on both is fine.
So, we have Firefox to thank really.
There has always been another way to acheive dthml client server interaction but that relied on invisible frames. Admittedly it was stable but by no means was it pleasant.
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