What Powers Google Maps? The Magic of Ajax

Most people are aware of browser battles (FireFox is my fav of course) but there’s also a battle for web standards that flares up now and then. From Active X and Java, Javascript, Flash, and XML to RSS and Atom and on and on, the battle for controlling what you see in your browser is also an ongoing tug of war, as well as a place where open source work can flourish.

Today, I thought you’d like to learn about a long forgotten technology called “Ajax” that has made a stunning debut in Google’s mapping service, Google Maps. The Wall Street Journal did a great piece about it some time ago. I have included an excerpt here for those of you who do not have a subscription, because it is very interesting stuff.

“Meet Ajax, the technology powerhouse. For years, it has been living indolently on your computer, never really doing much of anything. In the past few months, though, computer programmers, most notably those at Google, have begun to wake up Ajax and put it to work. And as a result, the computer industry may never be the same.

“Ajax is a recently coined name for a dense mouthful of software technologies that are built into Web browsers. The most important of them are JavaScript, a computer-programming language; dynamic HTML, which is a way of displaying information on a screen; and XMLHTTP, a procedure a Web browser can use to very quickly get information from a central server. To see what they are capable of, go to maps.google.com, zoom into a location, click inside the map and then drag the image around. It’s Ajax that is moving the map for you, scrolling it much faster than you’re probably used to on the Web.

“Browsers have been getting and displaying information since the Web began. What’s new is that Ajax lets them do so in a speedier way. In the past, to change even a small part of a Web page required reloading the entire page. But Ajax knows to fetch only the part of the screen that needs changing — like the edges of the Google map window as you move around.

Because less information is being sent from the main server, things move more quickly. That takes Ajax applications a big step toward the Holy Grail of having the kinds of speed and responsiveness in Web-based programs that’s usually associated only with desktop software, like Microsoft Office.

Sealing the Ajax deal for many programmers is the fact that everything required for it is standard, generic software that isn’t owned by any company and that exists in every browser. It’s as if someone discovered how, just by doing a little welding in a car engine, you could double the car’s gasoline mileage.

The term Ajax was coined last month by Jesse James Garrett, of the San Francisco Web consulting firm Adaptive Path. He came up with the pseudo-acronym in the shower while searching for a shorthand way to explain to clients how the recent offerings by Google can perform so robustly. Google, notes Mr. Garrett, isn’t the first to use Ajax. Pieces can be seen on Netflix, the film-rental site, and Flickr, a photo-sharing site. But Google has done the most with it, betting the farm on Ajax not only for Maps but also for its Gmail free e-mail service and several other offerings. (Not all Google software uses Ajax; its popular Toolbar, for example, doesn’t.)” Source: Wall Street Journal Online