Rich Media Gurus Explain Why AJAX is Sooo Special!

[mandy]

Fundamentally, the “Ajax” phenomena reflects an “eye opening” realization of what the web can be for the millions, instead of being a fascination of JavaScript/DHTML per se.

For the last ten years, the millions of netizens have accepted the web’s “click and refresh” experience as “that is the way it has to be”. In the background, there are various techies (for example, during 1998 and 1999, I wrote a word processor hosted at www.ajaxword.com, and there were startups like webos.com, desktop.com and halfbrain.com, all doing “Ajax” stuff in a much more polished way than most of the Ajax apps you would see today) screaming for a better web. These techies are loners. The market was not ready and the millions of netizens were not even thinking of something different.

I clearly remember myself talking to some well known executives in software companies in 2000 and 2001 about the “problems of the web” and they were like “huh?”. The true tipping point is due to applications like Google Maps. Apps like GoogleMap woke up the millions...

full article: http://ajaxworldmagazine.com/read/256389.htm