Backbase saves the back button

It's good to see Mark Schiefelbein's name popping up in the blogosphere. He's written a very nice piece about techniques for preserving the "standard" browser functionality while using Ajax.

Mark was a colleague during a large part of my time at Tridion, and he's since moved on to Backbase. Some of the talent from the old Tridion R&D team has ended up at Backbase, which is why I'm not even slightly surprised by the quality of the output we're seeing.

There's quite a resonance with the Tridion that was; Backbase are obviously putting lots of thought into making solidly engineered solutions to the problems most people haven't yet realised they have.

Without the Ajax hype, I'm convinced Backbase would have done very nicely anyway. Don't get me wrong; the Ajax hype is doing a lot of good, but get real, when the dust settles, we want the back button to be working. That means that if you're in the Ajax business, you're either in denial, or you're digging in now and solving the hard problems. 

While I'm on the subject of the Ajax hype, there was a sense in which giving these technologies a name felt a bit like a hijack.

Isn't it about time we returned the compliment and hijacked the name? The essence of Ajax is turning out to be nothing to do with Asynchronous Javascript or even XML. The buzz coalesced around the word, but mostly because it was sort of cool to actually have a word.

Isn't it about time we decided that Ajax doesn't stand for anything? It's just a name. Like SOAP was just a name that ended up not standing for Simple Object Access Protocol. Eventually someone retro-fitted the "Service Oriented" tag to it, but basically Soap doesn't stand for anything either now.

As far as I'm concerned, we might as well get used to the idea that Ajax also refers to the kind of client-side libraries that are offering a whole range of "rich" functionality.