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Bosworth On Why AJAX Failed, Then Succeeded
An anonymous reader writes "eWeek has a story describing a talk by former Microsoft developer Adam Bosworth, now a VP at Google, entitled 'Physics, Speed and Psychology: What Works and What Doesn't in Software, and Why.' Bosworth depicts issues with processing, broadband, natural language, and human behavior; and he dishes on Microsoft." Quoting: "'Back in '96-'97, me and a group of people... helped build stuff that these days is called AJAX,' Bosworth said. 'We sat down and took a hard look at what was going to happen with the Internet and we concluded, in the face of unyielding opposition and animosity from virtually every senior person at Microsoft, that the thick client was on its way out and it was going to be replaced by browser-based apps. Saying this at Microsoft back in '96 was roughly equivalent to wandering around in a fire wearing matches,' he said. 'But we concluded we should go and build this thing. And we put all this stuff together so people could build thin-client applications... Now you hear about AJAX all the time, but this was built in '97,' Bosworth said. Yet, AJAX failed for a variety of reasons, including some 'big mistakes.'"
Yep, I created an AJAX-like system as a pet-project in my high school web design course (boredom++) back in about 2000. I'm not sure if "AJAX" had really taken off by that point, but for fun, I decided to use JS to load remote pages, particularly of the scripted variety.
Ironically, I got a D- on my final project, which was a self-updating news feed reader (pulled XML news feeds from a few sites), because it "wasn't very user friendly."
... it has a name that people can easily refer to and brand as a technology. I'd seen/used AJAX implementations before, but now I have something to put on my resume. Simple as that.
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
Most people agree that AJAX is a silly acronym. (I personally think DHTML is much sillier). Let's examine it.
Javascript can do a lot, but it wasn't originally designed for heavy application logic. Without getting redesigned to allow it to used outside the browser or web server, I believe Javascript will become a limitation for "AJAX" eventually.
Also, the folks at Mozilla have plans to allow application developers using Gecko to completely sidestep javascript with other scripting languages, the first being Python:
<script type="text/python">
When this happens, will we see a new "technology" called APAX? Embedded scripting with Ruby begets ARAX? When does it end? Or does AJAX become an umbrella term like LAMP?
"And" is only there to make the name pronounceable. It also just happens to leave us with a somewhat familiar word.
XML here implies that you can only work with XML formatted data, which is not the case. XMLHTTPRequest also maintains a copy of the response as plain text, so it's just as easy to work with CSV, for example. Except there's no CSV parser built into Javascript.
AJAX is a silly name, but we're probably stuck with it.