Ajax, Ajax Everywhere
In February 2005, Adaptive Path published an essay called "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications" by Jesse James Garrett. This week I got to participate in an Ajax Summit sponsored by Adaptive Path and O'Reilly. Yes, there were just three months in between the naming and the first conference. That's fast even at internet speeds. What's Ajax? For us, the geeks, it's Asynchronous JavaScript + XML. For the rest of the world, it's a whole new way of looking at the web. Really.You know how the web works, right? You click a link in a browser and your computer says, "hey server, send me this page." And the server says, "sure, here ya go." And you see the page. Click, rinse, repeat.
Ajax, and the pile of techniques and technologies that get lumped in with it, are all about breaking that page-by-page web experience into smaller chunks. If the traditional web was letter writing, Ajax is instant messaging.
Right about here is when the inevitable example of Google Maps comes up. And for good reason. It's just so darn cool to click and zoom around. But it obscures what Ajax is really about. It's like using a race car to explain what an engine is. It's in there, sure, but wow look at it go!
Put simply, Ajax lets web pages to go back to the server for updates in between page refreshes. Before, once you got the page, you were done. But now, with Ajax, the page can respond with server smarts as you interact with it.
We web developers have an opportunity with Ajax to really improve the user experience on the web. And I, for one, can't wait.
posted by Camilo Pérez @ 20:27
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