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January 23, 2006

The Father of AJAX?


So I received this e-mail from Jeremy Geelan at sys-con.com promoting a "Real-World AJAX" seminar coming up at the end of the month. It says:

... for the "Real-World AJAX" one-day seminar, featuring Jesse James Garrett, the father of AJAX.

Ummm, OK, I don't know why is this has become such a wide-spread misconception, but Jesse James Garrett DID NOT INVENT AJAX!!!! Jesse, while I'm sure an extremely nice person, is simply a AJAX evangelist who coined the *term* AJAX for an *already existing technology* for asynchronously communicating with your server via JavaScript. The real "father" of AJAX is the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft (I think), who first implemented the XMLHTTPRequest object in Internet Explorer back in the mid-90s as an ActiveX control.

In fairness, this misconception is seemingly not propagated at all by Jesse or the company he works for (a cursory search of adaptivepath.com doesn't refer to him as the "father" of anything). It seems like a marketing twist by the folks at sys-con to promote their event. Sadly, I can't say I'm suprised.

Posted By Dave on January 23, 2006 at 4:35 PM
Related Categories: Technology
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Dan G. Switzer, II's Gravatar I think the confusion comes in, because I've seen him refered to as the "father of the phrase AJAX" or "the founder of the term AJAX." This very easily gets confused by people as meaning he's the creator of the methodology--which he never claims to be.

I think if you change the quote to:

... for the "Real-World AJAX" one-day seminar, featuring Jesse James Garrett, the father of *the term* AJAX.

It becomes accurate.

Ce la vie...
# Posted By Dan G. Switzer, II on 1/23/06 at 5:14 PM
Dave Carabetta's Gravatar Agreed. It just seems like if you're going to promote something, don't mislead your intended audience. And if you were to read the content of the web site the e-mail points to, http://www.ajaxseminar.com/, you'd see that they emphasize several times the fact that he's the "Father of AJAX," which is simply not true. Yeah, C'est la vie, but also shady marketing.
# Posted By Dave Carabetta on 1/23/06 at 5:23 PM
Rob Brooks-Bilson's Gravatar Hi Dave,

I had the same reaction as you when I read the email.
# Posted By Rob Brooks-Bilson on 1/23/06 at 6:20 PM
Charlie Arehart's Gravatar FWIW, along the same lines but a little different, my thought when I saw that ad was more, "gosh, I'll bet he's a little embarassed by that and will probably feel the need to make it clear at the podium that he does NOT think of himself as the 'inventor'". Still, I don't cast aspersions on Sys-con for using the term and see nothing really nefarious in it.

Indeed, if you do a google search for:

"father of ajax" garrett

You get 132,000 hits. Clearly, Jeremy and company aren't the first to use the appellation. :-)
# Posted By Charlie Arehart on 1/26/06 at 7:03 PM
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