Web 2.0: AJAX underpins services

Google Inc. has backed and acquired key players in the Web 2.0 world. Its biggest Web 2.0 splash, though, comes from internally created services.

Google’s brain trust of coding and design talent has pushed Web development in so many innovative directions, programmers stand ready to follow its lead.

The company unwittingly catalyzed the mania around one of the year’s most-talked-about technologies, AJAX. The acronym stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Extensible Markup Language), an unwieldy but potent bundle christened by Jesse James Garrett, the director of user experience strategy for Internet consultancy Adaptive Path. In February 2005, Garrett posted an essay on Adaptive Path’s Web site dissecting how a new wave of Web applications uses a collection of technologies including JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to mimic the speed and smooth feel of desktop programs. Google’s Gmail, Maps and Groups sites were among the examples Garrett cited to illustrate AJAX at work.

The essay unleashed a flood of feedback and commentary. AJAX rapidly passed into common developer lingo as software companies rushed out AJAX toolkits and press releases highlighting their own AJAX-compatible architectures.

“Week after week, the level of interest in AJAX that I’m seeing just keeps going up and up,” Garrett said in a recent interview. “The really remarkable thing about the AJAX essay, and the thing we were really unprepared for, was the way that it resonated far beyond the design audience for which it was intended.”

AJAX resonates now because the tech world is finally ready for it. In so many ways, Web 2.0 feels like dot-com déjà vu. Startups are hot again, venture capitalists are excited, programmers can cook creative new applications at home in their spare time, and users are willing to put in the effort to incorporate exotic new technologies into their lives. But many of the actual tools for building Web 2.0 programs, like JavaScript, have been around for years. The technology was available. It was the society that needed time to catch up.

“The upsurge of interest in AJAX applications is not driven by anything technological. It’s all about sophistication in understanding what the technology can do,” says Adaptive Path’s Garrett. “That sophistication is something that sometimes takes a few years to develop.”