James Carr

First let me start this post by putting on my Captain Obvious hat.

[puts on hat]

There that’s better. Okay, time to post.

Sadly, I must concede defeat. Like numerous others, I used to always get a little riled up when someone mentioned the term AJAX back in 2005… like others, to me it represented a marketing buzzword that had no place in technical speak amongst web developers and software engineers. “Either use the term XmlHttpRequest or XHR if you’re referring to client server communication in javascript, or use the appropriate names if you’re just referring to javascript and CSS” I’d say.

Unfortunately, AJAX became the common term, and sadly other developers wouldn’t understand what I was talking about unless I used the term AJAX.

“We could just take the form action, serialize the field name/values, and send it via XHR.”
“XHR!? Huh? What’s that?”
“XmlHttpRequest”
“???”
“Uh… AJAX”
“Oh! I gotcha! Sweet. Could we also use some AJAX to make the info window fade in?”

I was thinking about this the other day when I got an email from a customer to request a new feature. They essentially wanted to change a form to submit to an in-window “window”. Simple enough. What interested me was that one customer referred to it as a “DHTML window” and another customer, in a separate email about the same feature, referred to it as an “AJAX Window” … and I couldn’t try harder to chuckle. DHTML was a pretty dubious term to begin with, and now we have AJAX, the new dubious term to represent javascript, dom scriping, and other “neato tricks.”

I guess what I’m getting at is… it looks like those of us who hated AJAX because it was a marketing term for something that had already existed since 2001 (and before, if you take the current interpretation of “AJAX”) have quite simply lost. It’s the term for it now, and it’s a buzzword that continues to be all the rage. At this point, I’ve given in… I’m perfectly fine with someone using the term AJAX.. I won’t get riled up anymore, but let’s call an apple an apple.

I can even accept the fact that AJAX is an oxymoron since most “AJAX Applications” have no XML involved. But I just really really wish that some people would quit using the term for just plain old javascript. Seriously… what is the point in calling a little DOM manipulation and animation effects AJAX? It’s not really Asynchronous and there’s no XML involved. Just like the early days, it’s just a rebranding of the DHTML term with a small update for XmlHttpRequest. Bleh.

I hate it. But I guess I have no choice but to accept it. Ajax it is.