AJAX vs AJAX
January 3, 2006
I am waiting on this book to arrive from Amazon in the next week or two and got thinking about AJAX tonight. If you’d asked me what AJAX was six months ago or earlier, I would have said it was a household cleaner:
…which made me wonder, since AJAX is a registered trademark to Colgate, have there been any lawsuits over the use of it? A quick search on google brought up the following information:
Colgate-Palmolive vs. Ajax.org. Those of us over the age of 40 remember Mom using the blue can of Ajax to scrub the pots and pans after dinner. Colgate-Palmolive took exception to the use of that trademark name by “Ajax.org.” Public support for the general information portal website was so strong, however, that the corporate giant eventually dropped the suit. (Source, 2003)
Ajax.org is now practically an empty site. I can’t seem to find any information on Colgate taking legal action against the current use of AJAX. (Unlike Sellotape ®) Since books are now being published, I guess the cat is out of the bag.
I’m still not sure what AJAX is :S I feel so behind the times with ajax and web 2.0, I think its because I’m not at uni anymore, and the boss at work is still getting over excited over RSS, so in a few years we might move on, if we’re lucky..
— Pete..., January 4, 2006
Part of the reason that tech trends succeed is due to their name. I know that this sounds superficial, but most people that aren’t deeply entrenched in the tech world don’t even know what AJAX is (see above comment). Due to the cool name, even though a person might not know what AJAX is, they are more inclined to learn about it. The same thing happened with XML. I contend that XML became the standard because people were attracted to the name. Techies had an easier time selling it to management because of the high tech name. Don’t get me wrong, XML is extremely powerful, but no more powerful than any other adopted standard for data exchange. I think AJAX is great and I can’t wait to see all the new web applications that harness it!
— Matthew Price, January 4, 2006
Matthew, I was hoping that comment would explian it for me! Is there such a thing as a simple explanation?
— Pete..., January 4, 2006
‘K, so I just read the synopsis on Rachel’s book link. Is Ajax an actual system in itself with its own code/markup, or is it as simple (and by simple I mean to understand) as using JS and XML together, thus avoiding some of the endless annoyances of .NET and similar web app interfaces?
— Pete..., January 4, 2006
Sorry I should have given a quick explanation Pete but I am no expert on it yet (waiting for that book, heh). Wikipedia helps a bit - the way I see it is a set of tools which use XML and Javascript and enable you to have some nice interactivity and rich user-interfaces without having to reload/refresh the page.
Here’s a nice example: Live search - type some words into Google and it shows common phrases as you type.
Here’s a long list of other AJAX examples
— Rachel, January 4, 2006
I never heard about AJAX before. Only the household cleaner AJAX and here in Holland the footbal team.
— redstar, January 4, 2006
— Pete..., January 4, 2006
[...] After my attempt to explain what Ajax is, while at the same time admitting that I didn’t really know, I’m glad to see from the comments at Cred8 (Ajax v Ajax) that there others who admit to being in more or less the same boat. [...]
— Blog Relations » Blog Archive » Ajax Part 2, January 6, 2006
Whenever I have been asked to explain AJAX, I have simply said, “Have you played around with Google Maps? http://maps.google.com/ You know how it all just seems to magically move when you drag the cursor around? You know how you can quickly zoom in or out? That’s AJAX at work… it’s fast because the browser is doing most of the work and just making small requests for more data when you scroll off the visible area.”
As others have said, it’s a combination of Javascript, XML (usually XHTML) and more.
— Dan York, January 10, 2006