Hello Ajax! How to Do the Ajax Thing with Oracle JDeveloper Get an introduction to Ajax programming by creating a simple "Hello World". Published May 2006 For sure, the world's most successful computer program is "hello world". Translations of it are available in almost every programming language and pattern. "Ajax" is a community acronym used by the software industry for a set of related Web browser technologies, which, in combination deliver the rich client user experience for Web applications. The promise of Ajax is to close the usability gap that currently exist between browser based web applications and existing client-server desktop applications. In this article you'll learn how to translate "hello world" into Ajax, going from simple to more advanced in small steps. About Ajax "Ajax" stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML and is the heart of the "Web 2.0" paradigm. By one definition (there are several), Web 2.0 is shorthand for a new generation of Web applications that offer increased responsiveness and richness of UI components, moving Web applications closer to what users experience with client-server desktop clients. Ajax is not a software standard but rather describes of a set of technologies -- including JavaScript, the Document Object Model (DOM), and the browser XmlHttpRequest object (XmlHttp object in IE) -- that are used in combination to build interactive, browser-based user interfaces. Because of the browser XmlHttpRequest object, Ajax applications can use asynchronous communication to retrieve data from the server. There is no 100 %-clear definition of what makes a