This post is years too late. But seeing as how there wasn’t much of a peep in the past, I can’t let it go into 2009 without one last scream. The coming month brings about the 10th anniversary of the creation of technology that made AJAX possible.
I’ve been doing AJAX since before it was AJAX. I’m not nearly alone in this. In fact, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of developers were already well into using XHR before it was big. But somehow, some markitecture dewsh[sic] bags coined the term and Web 2.0 neophytes and PHBs alike took hold and never let go. In case you were wondering, the technology was around for almost six years beforehand.
The damn thing is, it is a terrible acronym that doesn’t even accurately describe the technology. No one developing a scalable application who knows anything about performance would dare to use the XML of the X in AJAX to communicate between their remote (remember: LIGHTWEIGHT!) client and the server.
I have reason to believe through my masterful powers of LOGICAL reasoning that %99.999 of developers out there will actually be using either delimited text or JSON. Of course, I tend to stay away from the Microsoft world that defies logic, so my numbers might be inflated.
I can see why the markitecture dewsh avoided the term AJAJ as it doesn’t have a catchy pop culture product to propel it into PHB minds.
I propose an alternative for “the enlightened” individuals that chose to skirt the masses of Web 2.0 hype:
JAJA
As in JSON And Javascript Asynchronously. Or for those severely irked:
JAJAWLD (With Less Dewshiness)
Imagine your client coming to you and asking, “Could you sprinkle some JAA JAA in with this project?”
Ahh, to live in an alternative universe even for just a few minutes.
About the author
Mike Wille - I'm the head techie here with a passion and hunger for all things digital. I got into programming because I love to create and couldn't cut a straight line in wood shop.