From DHTML to AJAX and SPA's and WebAssembly

AJAX appeared first in 2005 in the Jesse James Garrett's article Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications, in which the author describes a new approach to develop web applications, and adopted by recent Google applications such as Gmail or Google Maps.

The term came from Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and comprised a set of technologies such as XMLHttpRequest, DOM or JavaScript, which altogether could be used to develop applications communicating with a server in background, without forcing a page refresh.

Until then websites used a model which forced the whole page to refresh with content from the server for each user interaction, even when only part of the information needed to change.

Before AJAX we relied upon DHTML to build more interactive web sites. However, even with DHTML, the underlying model was still based on the traditional request/response pattern.

Over time, AJAX itself evolved too. For example, using XML and XSLT was no longer needed, and both were usually replaced by JSON. For some time, at OSOCO we were fans of an AJAX variant named AHAH.

The traditional model based on separate pages has been replaced by single-page application or SPA, which doesn't require the whole page to be completely reloaded every time, and allows for richer web apps.

More than 20 years later, the trend is to leverage the capabilities of web technologies and browsers in accordance to widely-supported standards and not mere hacks.

Latest technologies we like most are Web Workers, PWA, Web Components or WebAssembly. For example, the latter makes this game possible.

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