AJAX discussions prove interest in Javascript

AJAX is a web development term that's recently been circling the web and some blogs. I think the term was originally coined by web guru Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path in this article. Scoble had an interesting post (with many interesting comments) about AJAX and OWA (as former Exchange & Outlook Magazine editor-in-chief I still have a soft-spot for OWA). Do a technorati search on AJAX and you'll see that the blogosphere is buzzing.

And one of the other editors here asked me what we were doing with AJAX so I turned the question to one of my expert Javascript authors, Nicholas Zakas, and it turns out, he'd already written an AJAX chapter last fall for his upcoming Professional JavaScript for Web Development book. OK, not exactly. What he wrote for that book is chapter 16 "Client-Server Communication" (see the full TOC here) which is all about AJAX principles without actually using that term not coined until a couple of months ago.

I'm glad to see all the interest in Javascript, especially amongst serious web developers. A year ago when Nicholas and I started on the book, it was considered a bit of a risky project because some people thought that JavaScript was a long-in-the-tooth, past-its-prime development technology that no serious developer needed to know anything new about. I'm glad that discussions of AJAX are proving that wrong and hopeful to see Nicholas and his book be huge successes.