The Ajax was first introduced by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path’s in February 2005. Ajax enables partial web page modifications—It means that changes in small parts of a web page without reloading entire web page.
In this way a more similiar desktop like GUI is created, and allows users to interact contineously with web page. During that interaction server processes requests of the user in backend.
Ajax consists of
- XML
- DOM
- JavaScript
- CSS
- XHTML
- XMLHttpRequest
Netscape used asynchronous web page updates in LiveScript in 1990's. LiveScript later became JavaScript. However, Ajax has become popular since its naming. Ajax is key player in Web 2.0 applications.
There are many toolkits and frameworks which provide libraries and tools for easy Ajax-based applications development.