Honestly, my thinking about the whole “Ajax” thing has vacillated between thinking it was a publicity grab and looking at it as merely a reasonable attempt at coming up with a better name than “XMLHttpRequest+Javascript+DOM” or whatever. I guess this post kind of reflects that ambivalence. As I said, though, I do have a lot of respect for the Adaptive Path people, so I’m sure you’re right that it was the latter rather than the former.

I don’t think AP wanted to steal the phrase and make it their own, they simply wanted to help people describe it. I don’t see anything selfish in what they did, they simply floated a phrase out there, aimed at the general populace instead of coders doing the grunt work. My point earlier today is that while folks argue about the exact nature of the term, they could be instead making money for themselves.

I’m happy to see ajax concepts finally get some legs because as I noted in earlier posts on my site, I worked on ajax stuff four years ago. It was amazing then and I thought it would revolutionize web apps overnight, but that never happened. It finally seems to be happening now, and I’m just happy we’re finally getting better applications. Maybe coining the term ajax was part of that, maybe not, but at least users are getting real email, mapping, and photography services on the web now.