There are incredible much fuzz about Ajax and web 2.0 lately, and it has been for about a year now. And it's not only the name Ajax that gets people scared from it, it's also understanding the technology. I'm going to try to explain in simply words how this is put together.

It seems that Ajax is here to stay and that is about to change the web radically. Its not new, it has been around for about a year or two but its just in the beginning of that the layman will get around to see it.

And it's going to be cool. For those who don't know what Ajax is, I can tell you that it is a web based almost a replacement for flash. It is combined by two different technologies that aren't exactly new. The first one is Javascript, that all know of.. and the second is the more unknown called XMLHTTPRequest object. Almost all browsers support Ajax (based on those to technologies), and in the matter of fact XMLHTTPRequest object was introduced in Internet Explorer 4.0 (which is not the newest browser on the market..)

To describe Ajax the simplest way: Think of a web page that has a form on it, and when you enter information in the fields or click the submit button, all of the data on that form is sent to the server on the Internet and you will be redirected to another page. Ajax works like this: Imagine the form on the page again, when you enter data in the form a Javascript is triggered to automatically send data to the server, but.. and this is important.. in the background! So you don't see that the data is sent. And with that kind of flexibility and seamless integration it opens up a world of new web pages on the Internet.

The chance of you already have used an ajax site is high, Gmail is ajax enables for example. To see some examples of ajax there are many sites, but i'm not going in to that now.

To examples of cool ajax based web sites is: Google Suggest and http://eyeos.org

What's very important to understand is that ajax is heavily dependant on Javascript, if JavaScript is not enabled you will not be able to run ajax applications. But almost all of the browsers have enabled Javascript by default, so it shouldn't be a problem.