Exactly. It was also one of the first mainstream web apps to make widespread use of XMLHttpRequest. The term AJAX hadn't even been coined at the time of Gmail's release, and it was probably a major factor in the popularization of the technique.
It enabled genuine "web apps"; I think the first one I used that was really different from a static web page was Google Maps. Apparently that was 2005, I'd be interested to see other people's comments on the first really useful AJAX app.
People were definitely experimenting with it before that. Developers were mostly using it to load direct server-side snippets of HTML, dynamically. It took the evolution of SOAP and (especially) JSON/RESTful APIs for it to start seeing mass adoption as the combined technology of "AJAX".
Prototype.js and jQuery had a big hand in the latter.
Did you really hear anyone talk about AJAX in the '90s? Looks like there was some work done on XHR in '99, but it seemed to roll out across browsers in the early '00s and seemed peak hype when I started my career in the mid '00s, after the Web 2.0 conf in '04.
So that feels like saying ASP.NET AJAX was way ahead of the game. And in some ways it was.
And in other ways you had this massive __VIEWSTATE hidden input field that would have to be sent in order to recreate state. But I will say, it was very cool technology at the time.
AJAX was a catch-all term meaning “the page does things without reloading the whole page” if I remember correctly - or that’s how people were using it.
I'd take his comment with a pinch of salt, that is years before ajax applications were even mainstream.
gmail wasn't even released until 2004, and that was probably the first mass-market application that really unleashed the full power of ajax and made people stand up and notice.
But the other thing that was life changing about it was how easy it was to make ajax requests!
What's the "modern" alternative to jQuery in that regard? I don't do much JS development, but if I needed to make an AJAX request today, my first instinct would probably still be to use jQuery.
We tend to discuss things that are easy to talk about.
AJAX (as it was at the time) is a prime example of what Dan's talking about, I think. As a term that enveloped the whole idea of having JavaScript dynamically load content from a server, it really brought developers together in discussing and experimenting, and even resulted in naming a publication on the topic (Ajaxian). Did it matter that almost no-one was really fetching XML (the X in AJAX)? No.
"HTML5" played a similar role for a bunch of technologies 7-8 years ago, even including technologies that were nothing to do with the HTML5 spec (such as WebGL). Or DHTML 15-18 years ago.
We now see something similar with "serverless" which a lot of people criticize as a pointless term except it is bringing together discussion around a group of related concepts and is valuable in that role alone.
Other such terms that are ultimately ambiguous under close scrutiny but which allow discussion and communities to organize around them: IaaS, SaaS, NoSQL, devops..
Google Maps was the first widespread use of Ajax outside Microsoft, and its near-realtime interactivity blew people away. Prior to that, few developers believed this level of interactivity was possible. After Google Maps, everybody learned Ajax and a thousand interactive flowers bloomed.
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