davidflanagan.com > March 2005

Ajax (the name) Considered Harmful

Having updated Java in a Nutshell (see below), and nearing a feature-complete release of Jude (also see below) , I'm turning my attention back to JavaScript, in order to begin an update of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide

Of course what I discover is that everyone is talking about Ajax.

And I want it to stop! The concept is great. The name is lousy.

The term "Ajax" was coined in a blog entry by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path. It stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML..

Here's why I don't like it:

It emphasizes the wrong points

1. Client-side JavaScript is event-driven. Any program with an event handler is asynchronous.
2. The XMLHttpRequest object, which is the core technology under discussion, can operate in synchronous or asynchronous modes -- there is nothing fundamentally asynchronous about it.
3. XMLHttpRequest is itself misnamed: it can be used to retrieve any type of content from a web server, and should simply be called HttpRequest. If you retrieve XML data, the XMLHttpRequest object will parse it into a DOM tree for you, but you can also, very fruitfully, use it to retrieve data encoded in a simple form, such as plain text.

So, if we take the Asynchronous and XML out of Ajax, we're just left with ja. No longer such a catchy term, is it?

To my mind, the most important parts of the "AJAX" model are the ability to dynamically retrieve content, and the ability to transform XML content using XSLT. But retrieval and transformation are not part of the acronym

Ajax is a marketing term

In a FAQ at the end of his blog entry, Jesse says: "I needed something shorter...when discussing this approach with clients."

In other words, the person who coined the term Ajax believes it should be used when speaking to clients. We in the developer community should not adopt the term because it doesn't really capture what we're talking about. Because it does not say what it means, it has already turned into hype.

Ajax is probably trademarked

You can buy it for your kitchen sink for 89 cents .

What should we call it?

I know this is a battle I cannot win, but allow me to offer two humble alternatives:

DIRT: Dynamic Information Retrieval and Transformation.

STAR: Scripted Transforms And Retrieval

Heck, even calling it DHTTP would be more accurate than calling it Ajax, and that term would go nicely with DHTML!

New Edition of Java in a Nutshell

The 5th edition of the increasingly inacurately named* book Java in a Nutshell is out!

My copies arrived yesterday. Amazon is not yet showing same-day shipping, but I'm sure their copies are almost there, and should be ready to ship very soon.

This edition of the book covers Java 5.0 and weighs in at 1200 pages. The major new language features (generics, enums, annotations) are covered in a new chapter of their own. Less major new features (for/in loop, autoboxing, varargs, static imports, covariant returns) are discussed in chapter 2. I'm partiicularly pleased with Chapter 5, which is 95 dense pages of examples that demonstrate how to use the most important classes and packages of the J2SE platform. The API quickref has of course been updated to reflect the new syntax of generics, annotations and enumerated types.

See the amazon box to the left if you want to buy this book!

*With apologies to the late Douglas Adams