The Two-Year Birthday of AJAX

(updated at Dec. 18, 2007)

Today (Feb. 18, 2007) is the official two-year birthday of AJAX. Few things have brought the world the impact as great as AJAX. Within only two years, the World Wide Web has changed so much; and the transition is still in process. "Web 2.0" was a term hardly known by many people two years ago while it had already been elected the person of the year of 2006 by Time Magazine. The reason, however, lays on the realization of a simple but remarkable idea---asynchronously transmitting data only when they are requested. The technology syntactically is built upon the JavaScript language. Hence it gets the name Asynchronous JavaScript, which is AJAX.

From the view of web evolution, AJAX provides a brand new solution to support the creation of new-quality web resources, on which Web 2.0 stands. When we name a thing 2.0 rather than 1.x, it means a revolution in certain degree. People who still confuse about the name of Web 2.0 are the ones who cannot see the revolution. In fact, the most revolutionary phenomenon is that Web 2.0 supports new-quality products simultaneously on its data resources, service resources, and link resources. These resources are not effectively supported by Web 1.0. And, every importantly, these new-quality resources are supported because of AJAX.

I am continuing writing the second part of my web evolution article now. I have received several emails asking about the progress of my writing. I am sorry that it is delayed because of my time schedule. Moreover, its content is much richer than the Part 1. Basically, in Part 1, we have presented a story of web evolution. But in Part 2, we will first figure the theory underlying the story, from which we are going to predict the future of the World Wide Web. I hope it would be released in another couple of weeks.