Why the term Ajax is useful
19th April 2005
Software design patterns are useful mainly because they provide a shared vocabulary: rather than discussing the intimate details of a three layered application architecture, we say “MVC”. Rather than describing an object that tracks your progress while looping over a collection, we say “Iterator”.
The same is true for Ajax. While the techniques it describes have been around for years, grouping them under a single term is extremely valuable for raising the level of discussion about them. No longer will we have to explain XMLHttpRequest / hidden iframes / crazy cookie tricks in depth when discussing sites which pull fresh information from the server without reloading the whole page. Instead, we can say “Ajax” and move on to more interesting things.
Matthew Haughey says it’s all about marketing. I disagree; it’s about smarter and more effective conversations.
More recent articles
- Datasette Enrichments: a new plugin framework for augmenting your data - 1st December 2023
- llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer - 29th November 2023
- Prompt injection explained, November 2023 edition - 27th November 2023
- I'm on the Newsroom Robots podcast, with thoughts on the OpenAI board - 25th November 2023
- Weeknotes: DevDay, GitHub Universe, OpenAI chaos - 22nd November 2023
- Deciphering clues in a news article to understand how it was reported - 22nd November 2023
- Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat? - 15th November 2023
- Financial sustainability for open source projects at GitHub Universe - 10th November 2023
- ospeak: a CLI tool for speaking text in the terminal via OpenAI - 7th November 2023
- DALL-E 3, GPT4All, PMTiles, sqlite-migrate, datasette-edit-schema - 30th October 2023