The Story of AJAX

December 2, 2005 in Short Stories, Web Development

I typically do short stories and this one will be somewhat of a story, but as Colin brought up a point to some people earlier about everything being AJAX. Now I am not the biggest Web 2.0 guy, because quite frankly a lot of it is used in a useless way where it is unneeded and adds no value to anything…but I would like to bring you the story of AJAX.

So one day I was sitting in my room doing some programming wishing that I had a different convention of going about things. I thought, “Wow, I got CSS, I got JavaScript, I got a client-side language…what could I do to make this run better and more real-time?” I did some research and to my joy I was able to come up with a solution…so I got to work inventing the XMLHttpRequest Object. It took me about 90 billion years and by the time I was finished I was kind of hungry and tired.

Shortly after the 30 minutes it took me to invent the XMLHttpRequest I thought of ways to implement it. What if I could do all the things I wanted to do with this application without ever reloading a page? Fantastic! I could use the XML standard to handle all my requests and responses on top of that I can suck all the information out of the database and store it without ever reloading a page.

Then I realized what I truly needed was some fancy JavaScript effects, huge ass text boxes, pink, blue, tag clouds, awesome buzzwords and the word “beta” in italic for everything. So I quickly jumped on inventing all of these things. Pink and blue took some time to invent but other than that I didn’t have many problems.

Like I said, I was sitting on the beach doing all of this when all of a sudden something amazing happened. This thing started catching on. All of a sudden AJAX was big chatter on the Web…now everyone was focusing on Web 2.0.

Now it is evident what AJAX is…it is a guy named Larry standing on one foot flying a kite and singing Teenage Wasteland by The Who.

Moral of the story (this one actually has one); some people are going to take a good idea and screw it up. By picking only the parts you like about it and calling it what it was originally called you’re fucking up everybody’s Christmas. It’s like if I started calling a “truck” a “car” just because its kind of the same and I like the word “car” better…so remember next time you’re driving home in your AJAX that you’re pissing off a lot of badgers.

Oh, I forgot…this story is beta and invite only.