I’ve been around long enough in this industry to recognize marketing fraud when I see it. The buzzword that has become of AJAX is one such instance. I’ve about had it with hearing people talk about how its so new and innovative. I know of at least 5 people, including myself, who were using Xml Data islands and javascript to produce dynamic output into a browser as early as 1999 and 2000. I find it amazing that an article can be written by a virtual nobody in the industry like Jesse James Garrett that proclaims something as “new” that has been around since before the first victim of the DotBomb industry.

The reality of the situation is that these technologies have been around for ages, but the world wasn’t quite ready for them yet. The industry was bellowing, “Bring out your dead” and Netscape refused to answer, insisting “I’m not dead yet”. Sorry for the Monty Python analogy but rings true. Now that the platform market has been mostly conglomerated, it’s much easier to roll client-side to server-side javascripting out to the public.

Additional influences like the proliferation of broadband internet access to the masses has made such uses of bandwidth possible on the public internet space as opposed to being restricted to local intranets — much like several of my similar implementations of the technology at AIMCO years ago.

This article isn’t all about anger over this marketing BS — although it is admittedly part of it. Its partly about the idea that marketing has taken over innovation in this world. Between all of the patent wars in the big companies, and other corporations, like Adaptive Path, taking over technologies and name them as their own the industry has just become a big war-ground for business folks. Lastly, this is about the idea that I’m about to post a few scripting examples of this in the next month. I don’t want them to be chalked up in the AJAX hype column.