Looking Back in Time
The technologies that make up Ajax are not new; they've been around for years. Netscape's LiveScript (eventually called JavaScript) allowed for asynchronous processing some time ago.
Netscape came up with support for Dynamic XML and Microsoft with the XMLHttpRequest object within the browser that can be used to retrieve data from the server asynchronously. This phenomenon was later called Ajax by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path in early 2005. Ajax was born. However, it was only in the fall of the same year that Ajax made its presence felt within development communities worldwide.
Google led the drive to make Ajax known to these communities by announcing the first public implementation of Ajax in Google Suggest. Because of these efforts, examples of the public use of Ajax can be found worldwide; a few of these examples are as follows:
- Google Maps
- Google Suggest
- GMail
- Live.com
And, the list goes on!