It’s impossible to keep up with the acronyms that appear on the Web these days. One of the latest to show up on my radar screen is AJAX which stands for “Asynchronous Javascript and XML.” In a nutshell, AJAX describes a technique for building web applications that don’t necessarily act like web applications. If you’ve used the keyboard navigation in Gmail or the smooth map scrolling at Google Maps then you know what I’m talking about. Instead of continually loading entire Web pages like traditional Web-based applications (e.g., most online stores), AJAX apps usually fetch information in the background and respond more like desktop applications. If you’d like more geeky details, you might find the Wikipedia entry interesting.
So the next time a software vendor comes calling and advertises his application’s AJAX-compliance, you can be suitably unimpressed by his buzzword-compliance.
Update: Kottke’s got a post about how he’s using AJAX on the main page of his blog. More details about the technology if you’re interested.
