Ajax

A bit busy today, so I decided to write a post which I can do bit by bit. Apologies in advance if it looks like I’ve done it piecemeal but that would be because I have. I was thinking today about the word “Ajax”. Why? Well, my office postman is Dutch and football mad. He often stops by to tell me how well things are going in the world of Dutch football – blissfully unaware, it appears, that I haven’t the faintest idea what he’s on about. Nice chap, though.

In case you hadn’t guessed from the pre(r)amble, Ajax is the name of a Dutch football club. Amsterdamsche Football Club Ajax, to be precise. But I didn’t get you here to waffle on about football (I can do that anywhere). The original Ajax was a mythical Greek hero from Homer’s famous Iliad, named Telamonian Ajax. According to the stories, he was a huge man who went into battle against the Trojans wielding a large war hammer and a shield made from the hides of seven oxen (that’s a big shield).

When I was a young boy, Ajax was also the name of a cleansing powder, and was the main rival to a product called Vim (now called Cif for some reason). Vim at least had a rational name, coming from an English word of obscure origin meaning “with vigour”. Only a highly paid advertising executive could have the brilliant idea of comparing a battle-hardened mythical warrior hacking his way through a phalanx of Trojans with attempting to get rid of that brown scummy stuff at the back of the cooker.

If you have a blog of your very own, you are either the “write things then step away before it breaks” type, or (like me) the “I wonder what happens if I change this setting” type. If you’re the latter, you will have no doubt run into the modern meaning of Ajax. I remember the happy old days of the World Wide Web when you would fill in a form field and the whole page would reload. Then you’d fill in the next and the page would reload again and so on ad nauseum. Ajax is a technology designed to avoid that situation and to make a web page behave more like a piece of software you might run directly on your computer. The word itself stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (I know, it’s a little tenuous). The asynchronous part comes in because the server does not need to update the whole page every time new information is available. If you need an example, think of a continuously updating share price on a web site.

You learn something new every day, don’t you?