The simple example I use in this article is an Intranet application that looks up employees in a SQL database based on parameters provided by the user. The example allows the user to enter any combination of Last Name and/or First Name . The application then queries the SQL database using an ASP page and shows the user the entries in the database that matched the query without performing a hard refresh.

This is an article written in 2000 by a co-worker of mine at SPI which discusses using the XmlHttpRequest object (then known as XMLDOM) to do "Ajax" operations.

Dennis loves to tell me how he has been doing it all these years, and in fact, he has. But I like to pull out a slide from one of my presentations:

* Why didn’t this happen in 2000?
* Many reasons
  * Lack of standards compliant browsers
    * JavaScript implementations all different
    * DOM manipulation/Eventing all different
  * CSS support lacking
  * Lower connection speeds
  * Lower processing power

The long and short of it: Screw the Microsoft IE team and Netscape Navigator team from the 1990s. Their petty bullshit set web application development back 4 years. We could have had this stuff in 2000 if they had stopped slitting each other's throats and actually worked with the W3C. I find endless amusement in the fact that the IE 7 exists because of some hippie programmers.