Section 1.2. The Rise of Ajax


1.2. The Rise of Ajax

On February 18, 2005, Jesse-James Garrett published an online article "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications" (http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php). The Web was becoming richer and responsive, closing the gap with the desktop. Garrett introduced "Ajax" to label the architecture behind the new generation of rich web apps like Google Maps and Google Suggest. Ajax isn't a plugin, nor a proprietary technology. It's an architectural stylea high-level design patterncomposed of many related technologies and ideas.

Ajax technologies and applications were around before Garrett's article labelled them as such, but the article was a tipping point. Just like when the terms, "object-oriented," "agile development," and "postmodernism" began to be used, a converging trend had been given a buzzworthy umbrella term around which a community could form. "Ajax" gave us a label for the systems that were combining several powerful technologies. With this label established, the development community could suddenly share ideas about how the technologies fit together, debate in blogs about different design approaches, build libraries to support these kind of systems, and catalog common patterns.

Strictly speaking, the term is an acronym "AJAX," for "Asynchronous JavaScript + XML"although Garrett has noted that other technologies like CSS and DOM are just as important in the Ajax equation. "Ajax" just happens to roll off the tongue a whole lot easier than "Asynchronous JavaScript+CSS+DOM+XMLHttpRequest." Consistent with his original article, Ajax is generally written "Ajax," not "AJAX." That's a mindset, not mere cosmetic detail, because Ajax is a design style and attitude rather than a precise set of technologies; the technologies are whatever happen to let us build the things we want to build. Throughout this book, I refer to Ajax in terms of what it offers users and their organizations. Here's a working definition:

An Ajax application builds on standard web technologies to deliver a rich, responsive, user experience.

If you look at the Ajax poster children like Google Maps and Gmail, it should be apparent how they fit this definition. They rely on nothing more than a standard web browser, be it Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox, Safari, Opera, or several others. The interfaces are rich in that they include input controls and display effects that go well beyond the familiar form-submission paradigm. And they're responsive in that changes happen quickly and incrementally. The definition is there to be applied pragmaticallythe last thing you'll hear from me is a big argument about whether or not application X is Ajaxian or not. We'll walk through typical characteristics of Ajax apps later on, but let's now look at some examples of how Ajax is transforming the Web.




Ajax Design Patterns
Ajax Design Patterns
ISBN: 0596101805
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 169

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