Ajax? What's that?

I have done my time as a web developer. I don't like it a whole lot, but I think the basic skillz are important ones for any IT or CS professional, like writing and communicating. The reason I don't like it is because I feel it is a poor platform for doing what so many people try to get it to do. I also used to feel that it was a futile excercise to keep trying - a waste of effort.

Then Google hit me upside the head with Google maps. Amazing things were happening there, and it wasn't a plugin. Then I start hearing about this Ajax thing which I at first thought was a new language or server or something. No, it's more comparable with MVC than JSP. The guy who coined the term (in this article) put it well:

Q. Is Ajax a technology platform or is it an architectural style?

A. It's both. Ajax is a set of technologies being used together in a particular way.

I hear some people are acting fairly childish and close-mindedly about the name Ajax. Go away, or we shall taunt you a second time.

Q. Why did you feel the need to give this a name?

A. I needed something shorter than "Asynchronous JavaScript+CSS+DOM+XMLHttpRequest" to use when discussing this approach with clients.

So now you know what Ajax is. I still would mostly object to a web app where a GUI would be better, but at least now there's enough tech, talk, and doc to make a reasonable interface for the user on the web.