6.2. Ajax Crash Course

Where once “Ajax” was the buzzword du jour, today it’s merely another tool in our web development arsenal—a tool we use to provide seamless and natural page interactions. Ajax can be a bit finicky to implement … unless you’re using jQuery!

6.2.1. What Is Ajax?

The term Ajax was coined in 2005 as an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Many people found the term problematic, as they were already doing Ajax-like work but without always using the technologies mentioned in the acronym. Eventually the term has settled down to simply mean almost any technique or technology that lets a user’s browser interact with a server without disturbing the existing page.