Blog: Web 2.0

In fifth grade, we did a unit on advertising. During that unit, the class learned to sing classic advertising jingles in chorus, like "I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener." One I remember most clearly is the Ajax tune, which Wikipedia claims is television's oldest ad jingle dating from 1948:

Use Ajax (ba dum ba)
The foaming cleanser (ba dum ba dum bum bum)
Floats the dirt right down the drain
You'll stop paying the elbow tax
When you start cleaning with Ajax

These days, Ajax is more well known as the "Asynchronous Javascript and XML" combination of technologies that lets a Web application talk to the Web server behind the scenes without requiring the user to go to a new page after every action - a technology popularized after Paul Buchheit and his team doggedly insisted on building a Javascript interface for Gmail, ignoring many objections from superiors until he proved that you can indeed build a kick-ass interface in Javascript.

I knew all the fundamentals of Ajax but never got around to actually writing an app in it, until today. I needed to do some annotating of my images as part of a project to link them to Facebook, and I wanted to be able to flip through many images quickly. After about half a day of coding, I now have a simple application that loads images behind the scenes, captures clicks appropriately, sends them back to the server, and keeps loading more images as needed.

I actually ended up having to figure through a few less simple pieces of Ajax, like how to keep a set of separate concurrent asynchronous XMLHTTPRequests going at the same time without them bumping into each other. But once you get the hang of the basics, it's quite simple to stop paying the elbow tax and start programming with Ajax.

Which one is a Star Wars character, and which a Web 2.0 company? Guess this and more at this hilarious quiz.