AJAX: Web ’shift’ or business as usual?
AJAX: Web “shift” or business as usual? | News.blog | CNET News.com
Mike Ricciuti, executive editor for c|net raises the question about the hype over AJAX. Is it simply another buzzword created as “a way for some vendors to sell more products without doing anything new”, as Dare Obasanjo, a developer at Microsoft puts it?
I would be careful not to put too much hype on AJAX, but it’s definitely a technology worth looking at. Until recently, there was no easy way to allow the client (web browser) to communicate back and forth with the web server without refreshing the page. Thanks to Microsoft (and to Mozilla for following suite), we have the XMLHttpRequest javascript object. Again, until recently, it really hadn’t been tested on the scale that Google can bring to the table. Google Maps and Gmail are the first large-scale tests of the technology and the results are fabulous! AJAX is more of a realization that web applications don’t have to behave like traditional web applications. Google has raised the bar.