AJAX was made in /completed in 1997.

It failed at first and then succeeded later.
header: Infrastructure
Google's Bosworth: Why AJAX Failed (Then Succeeded)
By Darryl K. Taft
January 30, 2007
See this link:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2088644,00.asp

GWT is really powerful no doubt - but to easily bypass all the browser compatibility issue and repeated cross-browser coding required for AJAX, you could use the easily implementable and lightweight JavaScript library called Prototype.

With Prototype, you hardly need to know the inner workings of AJAX.. all the required functions are pre-coded into it. All you need to do is create a new Prototype AJAX object and pass it the required parameters.

Further details on Prototype can be found here: http://www.prototypejs.org/

Good resource M^E. Although, personally, I still prefer to do all my AJAX code by hand. Once you've dealt with browser issues once, it turns quickly into a copy paste job. Especially with the advent of IE7, which updated the HTTPXMLREQUEST object. Right now, the biggest issue I have with compatibility between browsers is what each of the 4 request states mean in each. However, since none of them completely usefully implement the states, and they all implement state 0 and 4 the same, it doesn't make that much difference. But the tools available are getting much better.

~Viz

afaik the technology behind ajax have been developed during 1997 as teamEFX stated, but the term AJAX has been coined around 2005, just what i've found when reading some articles from various web blogs.

At first i thought it was just an old javascript scripting coz of the old animation features (scrolling and other corny but somewhat cool animation) that has been modified in modern way (dom version).

Since it's from javascript you can create it from scratch but much easier if you used a pre-made framework. e.g. prototype, rico, jquery and others.

imo it's best and effective when incorporate with server side scripting like php, asp and jsp.

here some additional links to the bestajax/js frame work besides prototype(link above)
Rico: http://openrico.org/rico/home.page
Scriptaculous: http://script.aculo.us/
mochikit: http://www.mochikit.com/
Yahoo UI: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
MooFX: http://moofx.mad4milk.net/
JQuery: http://www.jquery.com/

for php i prefer to incorporate those js framework rather than using those bloated framework like symphony.

Does anyone have some links for ajax on what all I can do with it that would be useful? I know javascript, and I believe I could pickup xml without much of a problem. I'm just now sure of how they would both combine to provide a nice interface on my website. Okay, thanks to anyone who can add to this