Ajax – A revolution or just another old thing?

Growing up in a bitterly cold country in northern Europe, I spent a lot of time watching soccer (In Norway, we call it by its proper name: football ). One of my favorite teams was the awesome Dutch team, Ajax. Peppered with great players like Johan Neeskens, Johnny Rep, Ruud Krol, and, above all--the talented genius, Johan Cruyff--Ajax won several cups including three European Cups, six league titles and the World Cup. The Ajax team created a place in football history.

Ajax is in the news again, however it is not the football team making news this time around.

Ajax also stands for Asynchronous JavaScript+ XML and can be used with any web development platform : .NET , Java/J2EE, PHP , Perl or any other server-side deployment. Ajax is not a technology in itself; rather, it is a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together to create interactive web applications.

Ajax uses a combination of the following:

• HTML (or XHTML) and CSS for presenting information
• The Document Object Model manipulated through JavaScript to dynamically display and interact with the information presented
• The XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with the web server. (XML is commonly used, although any format will work, including preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON and even EBML)

(Source: Wikipedia)

Ajax is just old stuff wrapped up in a new buzzword. Granted, it is a cool buzzword (especially to European football fans), but it is hardly revolutionary. Microsoft developers have utilized the conceptual foundation of Ajax for years to create data-centric applications on the web. In some sense, Microsoft has moved beyond this to the next great thing: Smart Clients.

Maybe in a few years when Smart Clients is mainstream, we will have another buzzword named after some other European soccer club. Liverpool is my all-favorite soccer team (oh, to relive the days of Kevin Keegan--exactly 100 goals in just 323 appearances before leaving Liverpool) and

I think Liverpool should be the new buzzword for Smart Clients. What do you think?