Introducing AJAX

In 2005, Jesse James Garrett published an article in which he tried to condense the changes he had been seeing in the way that websites were being designed into a pattern. After studying this trend, Garrett proposed that dynamically updating pages represented a new wave of software, resembling desktop software, and he coined the acronym "AJAX" to describe the technological concept powering such rapid movement toward "web applications".

This was the diagram he used to demonstrate the general pattern:

Note

The original article can be found at http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/ajax-new-approach-web-applications.

The "Ajax engine" Garrett's diagram referred to, had in fact existed in most common browsers by the year 2000, and even earlier in some. JavaScript implementations of the XMLHttpRequest (XHR) object in these browsers gave web pages the ability to request "chunks" of HTML or other data from servers. Partial updates could be dynamically applied to a web page, creating the...