Timbru

Adaptive Path — a respectable company, mind you — is wrapping up a series of existing concepts and technologies under a catchy name, in order to build momentum and gain serious attention.

They didn’t invent anything with Ajax. Even the examples they give are not as revolutionary as they want everyone to believe. The greatest example of ajaxness (see, anyone can make words up) I can think of is TasksPro. I’ve been playing with it about a year before Gmail became public, and it still kicks serious ass. Mappy did the Google Maps thing since last century or so, although using Flash and not as nicely, but working great for the European space.

Ajax is:

• not a web standard;
• not a server-side application;
• not a JavaScript library;
• not a strict methodology;
• a viral marketing attempt in the geek world.

Or, as summed up by a Slashdot member: Jargon - Yet another result of marketing BS trivializing the momentous and complicating the obvious… .