1.4. Remote Scripting

At the heart of improving the usability of a Web application is removing the communications bottleneck between the user and the Web application. Using most Web applications means spending tons of time in search screens looking up an item's ID or waiting for a page to reload. The simplest way to solve these problems is to talk to your server from JavaScript and skip the page reload.

Experimentation down this new path began in 2001; at the time, it was called remote scripting. A couple of different approaches were used, but most ended up being an RPC-style approach using JavaScript's XMLHttpRequest object for sending the data. This same approach is used in many AJAX implementations today, so why did it take four years for its use to become widespread? It may have been that most developers weren't comfortable using JavaScript. It also might be that questions about why a specific Web technology is used or not seemed impossible to answer. However, I think it was just a case where it took a long time for a critical mass of acceptance to be reached.