The Ajax Definition

The word Ajax was first used the 18'th of February 2005 and was typed into the web world by Jesse James Garret in an essay called Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications. And all though there has been virtually billions of attempts to try to define Ajax I think most of them fail because they go too much into the details of what the technology is all about. We're gonna try to set the records straight here and start from a more philosophical perspective to make sure you get the point! ;)

So what is Ajax really about?

First of all it's definition (the acronym AJAX) doesn't really say much; Asynchronous JavaScript and XML! But the header of the article to Mr. Garret says a lot: A NEW approach to Web Applications. So what was the old approach all about? We're gonna try to answer those questions in a philosophically manner more than in a concrete manner here.

What was the old approach?

First of all it was about content! If you think about that one for a while you'll come to realize that at least the way most people looked at the web-o-sphere in the earlier days it was about finding content, you would fire up some browser and either go to your favourite search engine, bulletin board or Usenet vendor and retrieve content! Now while this is a pretty nifty feature in Internet and we should by far not disregard that way of using the Internet today, it is not the only way to use the Internet!
As more and more people starts to use Ajax they realize that they can do far more than just serving content today, they can in fact serve functionality! Take a look at 24SevenOffice and their ERP application. There's not really a lot of content there! In fact they've got an application where they expect their users to do something useful within instead of having content at all! In theory this was possible before, and some vendors even tried to do it with traditional post-backs, but when shit hit the fence they soon realized it was pretty close to impossible to do without some kind of alternative transportation protocol on top of the HTTP protocol. This is where Ajax comes into the big picture! It is a transportation protocol on top of the HTTP protocol!
Nothing more nothing less!

OK, I've got it but what's the point?

I see many blogs today that says that they don't get the point of Ajax, and that they just thinks it's a buzz and everything will fall back to the ground. If you think that then you will be yesterdays news pretty fast! Ajax is the new way of serving interactive applications and for application vendors it saves billions of dollars! If you start a company today delivering conventional desktop software to your customers then you will be outrun! First of all because your competition can deliver 500 releases every time you can deliver one, second of all because your competition can charge a lot more than you can because they deliver much more. And third, your competition will focus all their energy on one version of their product while you'll have to keep patching at least a handful of different versions!

But isn't Ajax way too immature?

Viable question! And in fact the only viable question to raise against Ajax as a concept, but... I think there's about 50% of all developers in the world working on Ajax at the moment! (might be a bit exaggerated but you get the point ;)
That's a LOT of people, in Norway alone we're 30 000 .Net developers! And Norway has 4 Million people! Now take those same statistics to India! How long do you think it will take before Ajax is 50 times more "mature" and "stable" than even the most complex Desktop environments in the world? Not to mention you don't have to even consider THINKING about backwards compatibility? When the source code for Windows 2000 emerged on the Kazaa network some 3-4 years ago, everybody was stunned by the language in the comments! This might be because I'm from the northern parts of Norway and more used to heavy language but I was more stunned by all the fixes and workarounds for different desktop applications! In fact you had gigantic switch statements which included software as Sim-City, Lotus Notes and even to some extend Microsoft Software! This "switch" statements checked if any of the (long list) of applications was running and if they were "patched" the behaviour of the system! All this was done to keep backwards compatibility!
As for nothing else Ajax will outrun desktop systems for nothing more than that it's a NEW approach and it can take all those proprietary switches and throw them away!

So at least my conclusion is; Ajax is here to stay!
Don't be yesterdays news, embrace the future and get Ajaxified today! :)

Thomas Hansen CTO at Gaiaware