Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1 Where, where lieth the fatally named, intractable Ajax? —Sophocles Purely in terms of buzz, two of the hottest web-development terms in recent mem- ory are Ajax and Rails. Ajax was just coined in February 2005, and seemingly over- night it sparked summits, workshops, books, and articles aplenty. At the beginning of that year, Rails was still a newborn getting scattered discussion in developers’ weblogs. Almost two years later, it claims hundreds of thousands of downloads, nine slashdottings, two conferences, and tens of thousands of books sold. Why all the noise? Are these technologies fads or worthy of lasting attention? There are solid reasons to believe that both Ajax and Rails will be significant fea- tures of the web development landscape for some time. Big players are leading by example: Yahoo, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and IBM have all started using and tout- ing Ajax techniques,
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