Unless you’ve been living in a cave or maybe Ratanakiri, then you have no doubt heard the term AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), but is it all just hype and a cool sounding name given to a process that has been going on for years? Or, is it going to revolutionize the way websites behave and make Web 2.0 do everything that it said on the box?

Well, as is the case with any hotly contested debate, the real answer is yes and no, the actual acronym AJAX is a bit of a buzz word as it is used as a catch all term for all asynchronous browser->server communications even when the response output from the server is plain text or JSON, which effectively takes the X out of AJAX. That covers the ‘no’, on the yes side once we move away from arguments over semantics and get down to basics, AJAX is going to change the way in which we surf the web and this change will be one of the biggest switches in how we access media since the invention of the television. We are now moving from the generation of the web page to the dawn of the web application.

At present we use websites by going from page to page, we look at one page, get the information or media we need then go to another page. Each time we move between pages the screen is cleared and the new page is loaded. This approach is extremely effective for content/article based websites, it’s just like turning the pages in a book and this intuitive approach is not surprising considering the aims of the internet's founding fathers. Now at the dawn of the Web 2.0 the direction the web is heading has shifted dramatically. Users now want true interactivity, user generated content and web apps that perform complex tasks that share more characteristics with desktop software than they do with electronic magazine type sites that were the bread and butter of Web 1.0. People have been talking about interactivity and software type web apps for years but until the release of Google Maps Beta none had ever truly come up with the goods in all departments.