Ajax or AJAX?

The term Ajax was initially coined by Jesse James Garrett to describe the style of web applications and set of technologies involved in making highly interactive web applications. Historically, the term Ajax spread around the web as the acronym AJAX, meaning Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. With time, however, people realized that the "X" in AJAX was not very representative of the underlying data format used to communicate with the web server in the background since most implementations were switching to JSON as a simpler and more efficient alternative. So rather than coming up with a replacement acronym like AJAJ that's a bit of tongue-twister, the acronym is generally being retired in favor of Ajax the term rather than AJAX the acronym.

At the time of this writing, expect to see a mixed and wide use of "AJAX" and "Ajax" to mean one and the same thing. In this article, we've stuck with "Ajax the term." Commercial products that provide frameworks enabling Ajax-style applications, however, tend to use the acronym form to distinguish from a similarly named cleaning agent product and to avoid any potential trademark or legal disputes.

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