Open Source
Ajax
The term Ajax, which was coined by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path in Feburary 2005, stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. Quickly the acronym AJAX spread like wildfire fueled by applications like Google Suggest and Google Maps. In less than a year the acronym AJAX has become "Ajax" the term for a set of technologies that have been around for years. These technologies (XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript) combined with asynchronous data retrieval via XMLHttpRequest provide a rich web browser interface.
Web browsers were originally designed to request a page from a web server and display that page in its entirety. In many applications, when a user changed an important field like Country, he was abruptly interrupted by a round-trip request to the server and a complete page refresh to populate the list of states within that country. This made for a very clunky and often confusing user interface. Using Ajax technologies, developers can fetch data from the server without page refreshes, making web applications feel more like desktop applications.
Many Ajax frameworks also make it easy to add effects such as highlighting, dynamically fading text and drag and drop. Frameworks such as Ruby on Rails have done such a good job supporting Ajax that it's virtually transparent to the developer. On the Java side, DWR (Direct Web Remoting) allows Java developers to call methods on server-side objects directly from Javascript. As these frameworks mature the term Ajax will most likely fade away and will just become the way modern web applications are developed.
