Most of my career, I have been an avid hater of JavaScript. When I was in college, back in the 33.6/56K pre-A/DSL era, we were trained to do as little processing as possible on the server and as much as possible on the client. This would save precious server resources while speeding things up by not having to make unnecessary trips to the server.

When I started out in the industry, I picked up a few bad habits and inversely have learned better ones along the way. One bad habit was doing everything server-side. As A/DSL became more commonplace among home users, bandwidth became less of an issue. It was so much easier to do everything server-side then having to write multiple versions of the same code to be cross-browser compliant. My feelings for JavaScript, I will admit, are misplaced. It is not JavaScript’s fault that certain browsers chose to have their own naming convention for the DOM. Not the end of the world - just makes our lives as developers more difficult then need be.

I have never really embraced JavaScript and now that I’m looking at Ajax, the love/hate relationship I’ve had for JavaScript for the past decade may cease. A decade later I am looking at JavaScript code again and smiling for the first time like I once was up until receiving that first assignment to make a cross-browser compliant JavaScript application.

Because of this relationship I’ve had with JavaScript, I have been very hesitant to look at Ajax. I was relieved to see familiar PHP in the examples I went thru and breathed a sigh of relief going, “This is what all the fuss is about?” Granted the examples were quite basic and I’m yet to put this to any good use but the fear I’ve had of delving into Ajax and subsequently, embracing JavaScript have dissipated today with the completion of the tutorials I undertook.