Tuesday, March 21, 2006

To acronym or not to acronym?

It's been fun watching all the hype fly around AJAX application programming over the past year or so. Especially fun considering that XMLHttpRequest has been in existence since June 2000.Even prior to that, while working at Netscape/Mozilla, I recall considering transferring application state via cookies, over non-page-transitioning HTTP 200 responses. The demands of other Gecko networking layer optimizations derailed any prototyping on that front. That was probably a good thing considering using cookies as a transport mechanism would have been woefully underpowered; hurray for XML over HTTP!

It does make me wonder what really kicked off the AJAX rage (including the acronym). I heard something about someone using the acronym in a blog posting somewhere, and that gave everyone a hook to hang their hat.


kplawver said...

It's actually been around since 2000 (at least).  It blew up because the guy who deconstructed GMail found it and raved about it.  Jesse James Garrett gave it its name, and once it got named, it got famous.   And once it got famous, it got co-opted, distorted and misrepresented to the point where now people thing AJAX means everything from opening HTTP connections and getting content without reloading the page (true) to drag and drop (false) to rounded corners (also false).

jeffsblog said...

The link to the JJG post: