subject: AJAX and Its History [print this page] AJAX and Its History AJAX and Its History
AJAX is a group of interrelated web development techniques used on the client-side to create interactive web applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. The use of Ajax techniques has led to an increase in interactive or dynamic interfaces on web pages. Most of the times the data is retrieved using XML HttpRequest object.
The term "Ajax" was given in 2005 by Jesse James Garrett. However, a patent application covering this type of user interface was filed on September 3, 2003, thus predating the term itself by two years. This application resulted in US Patent #7,523,401 being issued to Greg Aldridge of Kokomo, Indiana.
One of the basic facts of AJAX is that it is not a technology in itself; it is a group of technologies. Ajax uses a combination of HTML and CSS to mark up and style information. The term Ajax has come to represent a broad group of web technologies that can be used to implement a web application that communicates with a server in the background, without interfering with the current state of the page.
In the early 90's most websites were built on HTML, each user action required that the page be re-loaded from the server. According to the users this was not an efficient option. Each time a page is reloaded due to a partial change, all of the content must be re-sent instead of just the changed information. This sometimes placed additional burden on the server and use of excessive bandwidth. Asynchronous loading of content 1st became practical when Java applets were introduced in the first version of the Java language in 1995. These allow compiled client-side code to load data asynchronously from the web server after a web page is loaded. In the year of 1999, Microsoft created the XMLHTTP ActiveX control in Internet Explorer 5, which was later adopted by other browsers later. In April, 2006 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first draft specification for the object in an attempt to create an official web standard.
AJAX being a group of technology is a web development technique. Since its release it has been poplar among programmers.
