At the same time, we have always been weary of how these technologies are implemented. We don't use a particular technology simply because we can, or because "it is all the buzz" at the moment. We use technologies that make sense for what it is we are trying to achieve in our solutions.

We've seen some big companies implement "chatty" AJAX applications and then turn around and blame the platform for performance or other issues. It's like the guy who gets the new label maker -- suddenly everything around him gets a new label stuck to it. Obviously a developer needs to stop and figure out if it really makes sense to use a particular technology or not. Although, from a marketing point of view, we certainly are guilty of jumping on the AJAX bandwagon. We've been using it for years, but if it's going to garner some kind of special attention, we will certainly try to take advantage of that.

David: You're moving away from the A in AJAX. Where do you see the asynchronous part of the puzzle going? How does just the JAX part fit in?

Marek: Well, it's not that we are moving away from the A in AJAX as much as we talk to folks and fellow developers at events like user group meetings around North America about the asynchronous and synchronous nature of the XmlHttpRequest object.

Our aim in our presentations is, of course, to promote our products and services but we also try to give something meaty back. Something that our audiences can really chew on and leverage in their own development projects. AJAX is a coined acronym that has taken hold, I'm sure your readers know or have read about its origins so there is no need for a history lesson here.

AJAX as an acronym is kind of specific in that it is supposed to describe the use of different technologies like JavaScript, the XmlHttpRequest object, the DOM [Document Object Model], XSLT [Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation] and XHTML.

At a core level though, the important part here is the XmlHttpRequest object. It is this object that is utilized to make the requests to the Web server. A developer does not need to use JavaScript to leverage it, they might use LotusScript, VisualBasic or C# for example. It also does not have to return XML, maybe it returns a delimited string to be parsed.

The "A" in AJAX refers to making Web server requests that are "out of sync" with whole page requests. Meaning you are not refreshing the main page every time you need to ask the server for some information and refresh just parts of the users screen. But more to the core, the use of the XmlHttpRequest object in and of itself can be used in a synchronous or asynchronous manner.

Let's cite a couple of examples. First, the "over-used" example of Google Maps. When a map chunk in Google Maps is displayed on a users screen, the chunks come without regard to being before or after other chunks being displayed on the screen. Further, the user can continue doing things on the page in his browser as the map chunks are being written to the screen. They are truly asynchronous XmlHttpRequests.