AJAX: The term has created a new Era for web programming.

The way it is penetrating into the internet applications has created the two giants in the IT market to fight among themselves and outcast each other. Yes, I am talking about the two horses of today’s software industry- Google and Microsoft, and it is the first time that even the icon like Bill Gates is having a fear of his monopoly over IT Markets. For a long time Microsoft has been earning billions from his office software but the latest Google applications like Google Excel has created a ripple in the vein of the Microsoft’s IT market. Google made all these happen with a new technology called AJAX. To remain in the competition, Microsoft has started a new venture and has launched a Google like search engine called http://www.live.com/.

Now if we go into the history of AJAX, Microsoft has been the pioneer for AJAX type applications with the introduction of Remote Scripting in web programming.

Techniques for the asynchronous loading of content on an existing Web page without requiring a full reload date back as far as the IFRAME element type (introduced in Internet Explorer 3 in 1996) and the LAYER element type (introduced in Netscape 4 in 1997, abandoned during early development of Mozilla). Both element types had a src attribute that could take any external URL, and by loading a page containing Java Script that manipulated the parent page, Ajax-like effects could be attained.

But it was Google who started to take the full advantage of this new concept and introduced lots of web applications like Gmail, Google Earth etc that made him the front runner of today’s IT Industry.

Initially Web Application was complete static in its nature. User was not an active participant of the application but slowly there was a realization the users should be made the part and parcel of the web applications and should complete its definition as software system. The first attempt was made by Netscape who added Live Script in WebPages allowed people to put small scripts in web pages so that they could continue to do things after downloading them. Live Script became Java Script and grew more powerful, leading to a technique known as Dynamic HTML, which was typically used to make things fly around the screen and change around in response to user input. Doing anything serious with Dynamic HTML was painful, however, because all the major browsers implemented its pieces slightly differently.

After the invention of Dynamic XML, Microsoft added a little-known function call named XMLHttpRequest to IE5. This gave Google to explore AJAX to depth and narrow the bridge between desktop and web applications. The rest is a history.