Ajax, creamy goodness – Rails not required…

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Web technology keeps re-surfacing. Way, way back Microsoft added a feature
called XMLHTTP to
IE that went mostly ignored for a
long time. Specifically What XMLHTTP did was add

XMLHttpRequest()
so as to allow
JavaScript to make a call
to a server and get results back without having to reload the page. It is
possible that it’s adoption was hampered by it’s IE only nature as well as the
prejudice against all things Microsoft
out there. As a work around you could fake some of this with a hidden IFrame.

Relatively recently Google brought out
the beta of Google
Suggest
and tech heads went inexplicably apeshit.

Someone coined
the cute acronym
AJAX
and it was suddenly the new black. I suppose Ajax sounds better than
"JavaScript derived from Microsoft innovation".

Anyway, the folks that support Rails
have been
quick to
jump on the bandwagon
and make it seem like
Ruby on Rails
is the be all and end all of Ajax applications. As a subset of OSS zealots these
guys really have it down to a science ๐Ÿ™‚ An

article appeared on /.
and we are off to the races.

Interestingly of course this technology turns out to be deeply supported in a
automatic way in .NET 2.0. You can
download the tools
needed to learn .NET and work with the
coolness
for free.

AJAX Support Libraries:

 Tutorials and other information: