What is AJAX and why is it a
'must have' for Content Management?
123Live has been using AJAX technology to deliver a desktop-like CMS over the web in a commercial environment since May 2002 ...
... more than two years before Google!
"It is really, really, really hard to build something like Gmail and Google Maps, Google hired rocket scientists--they hired Adam Bosworth, who invented DHTML when he was at Microsoft. Most companies can't go and repeat what Google has done."
- David Mendels, general manager of platform products for Macromedia. (source)
"Ajax is a recently coined name for a dense mouthful of software technologies that are built into Web browsers. The most important of them are JavaScript, a computer-programming language; dynamic HTML, which is a way of displaying information on a screen; and XMLHTTP, a procedure a Web browser can use to very quickly get information from a central server.
To see what they are capable of, go to maps.google.com, zoom into a location, click inside the map and then drag the image around. It's Ajax that is moving the map for you, scrolling it much faster than you're probably used to on the Web.
Browsers have been getting and displaying information since the Web began. What's new is that Ajax lets them do so in a speedier way. In the past, to change even a small part of a Web page required reloading the entire page. But Ajax knows to fetch only the part of the screen that needs changing -- like the edges of the Google map window as you move around.
That takes Ajax applications a big step toward the Holy Grail of having the kinds of speed and responsiveness in Web-based programs that's usually associated only with desktop software, like Microsoft Office."
- Wall Street Journal
