What is AJAX?

A waste management company.

Looks like a toilet to me.  That's why I took the picture.

I accidentally stumbled across a9.com minutes ago.  I didn't see it in years.

Turns out, A9 is a search engine—I didn't know that.  The user interface is, you know, AJAX based.  Let's see what this means.  When you hover some item, you get a huge yellow tooltip, which of course no one reads.  When you click it, a popup menu appears.  In that popup, you can click some checkbox—and it will change status (that is, become selected/unselected).  All this comes without a full page refresh!

That's what AJAX gave us friends.  In the 90'es, Sir Tim Bernes Lee invented a system which basically brought computing 10 years back.  For the next 10 years, everything was so slow that you could expect and accept a 60 seconds delay after clicking a checkbox.  AJAX finally allows us to move on.  We're in 2007 and although it's still almost impossible to draw a non-straight line with AJAX, we're finally, s-l-o-w-l-y, moving on.  We no longer have to wait for that checkbox.  In the future, we will be able to play Lemmings on supercomputers.  That's cool.

Back to A9.  I click the “what's new” link and look what it says:

We redesigned the A9.com website to make it easier and quicker to discover information from more sources. The left hand column of the page has some groups of search sources that you can select from. Within each group, you can choose to display or hide specific search columns. You can quickly switch among groups, and you can also quickly add additional groups that we have built. You can also add any OpenSearch™ search source to any group, and move sources among groups by dragging and dropping them.

To make it easier to navigate your results, we have introduced a new continuous scrolling feature, so you no longer have to bother with next and previous buttons to move from one page of results to the next. You can now also drag-and-drop the columns to change their order on the page.

We have discontinued the A9 Instant Reward program, and the A9 Toolbar and personalized services such as history, bookmarks, and diary. To get help uninstalling your A9 Toolbar, visit toolbar.a9.com. We have also discontinued A9 Maps and the A9 Yellow Pages (including BlockView™).

So they added a few features that were ubiquitous in every program ever since the mouse was invented, and discontinued the only features that would have made A9 interesting at all.  Nice, isn't it.

Well my friends, that's what AJAX is all about.  If we can learn one thing from history, it's that we can't learn anything from history.