It was a year ago that the seminal article that launched the 'AJAX' term was published. AJAX, despite being comprised of technologies far older than one year, is, well.. one year old today! Happy birthday AJAX.

AJAX has had a very quick acceptance by the community, and I want to reflect on how I got into it.

I first discovered the possibilities of AJAX long before the term was invented when I went to visit Ed about two years ago and he had a page by Apple about XMLHTTPRequest open on his iBook. Ed was a long time DHTML coder, so I asked him what he was up to. He said he'd found this cool technology that'd let you grab remote XML documents directly from JavaScript. I was reasonably interested in this and I took the link away for future reading.

In the following weeks I decided to play with XMLHTTPRequest. I quickly discovered that XML wasn't necessary at all. Even though Apple's documentation claimed (at the time) XML was absolute necessary, it really wasn't. I quickly developed a proof of concept and did some passing of hashes back and forth, just general geek stuff, and I was impressed. I could see a lot of value in letting a page grab stuff every now and then. I played with setInterval, timers, and stuff to make some interesting proofs of concept, but nothing mindblowing.

Eventually I got into Ruby on Rails in November 2004 (after trying to recreate my own version in Perl.. euck!) and XMLHTTPRequest went out of my mind. A few months later some people suggested AJAX and Rails would be a good match, and I wrote a very basic library called xmlhttp.js for Rails people to use. It was popular for a very short while, but then DHH and the rest of the gang baked prototype.js and all sorts of amazing AJAX goodness straight into Rails.. hurrah! And, well, it rapidly became considered a technology suitable for use in a production environment.

AJAX has, therefore, been truly accepted in my opinion, and tools like Ruby on Rails, libraries like prototype.js, and applications like GMail have truly led the way in pushing it along. AJAX might represent a number of older technologies, but I've never seen a collective term market a whole concept so well. Long may it continue!

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