After a nice vacation and an awesome wedding (now hitched folks!) I am back.
It is kind of amusing when you discover that a technique that you were using in 2003/04 now has a name and is "buzz capable". It is even more amusing to consider the fact that I thought I was using something else entirely.
What is this about? Well, AHAH a newly named subset of AJAX. When I was at Epic Data (see the resume for more info) I was happily playing with AJAX (there weren't so many solid libraries back then and I was fairly new to all this stuff) and the page I linked to above looks almost word for word like the code I was using to pull information from our server to the browser front-end.
Here I thought I was using AJAX, which in essence I was, but it turns out that I was actually using the as then unnamed subset of AJAX - AHAH. I loved pulling down information into the innerHTML. It made the experience a little more "magic" and required *much* fewer full page refreshes. As I was totally new to the concepts at the time it also involved a lot of hair pulling.
One could easily argue that the need for AHAH is a bit of an exercise in splitting hairs - AHAH is a complete subset of AJAX...
So, what about collaborating? Well, maybe perhaps if I had gone to more developer meet-ups and participated more frequently in online communities I could have been more aware of what I was actually doing and shortened the gap between the unnamed thing I was doing and AHAH. Sometimes it is hard to get your head out of the work mindset and find time to go talk with fellow imagineers about what "the next big thing" looks like...
Over a beer....
