It’s written in AJAX!

Had a very long webinar this morning about some new software we’re looking at purchasing. The sales guy is showing us a bunch of features and blurts out the “AJAX” buzz word. I listen in more closely to see what he’s going to say. It goes something like this:

“This app was written completely with AJAX which is great!”, I correct him with “You mean that it USES AJAX right?”

He continues to insist that it is not .NET whatsoever and that AJAX is a family of programming languages which is what was used to make this great new application. Meanwhile I am staring at the page extensions of .aspx… I just rolled my eyes and bit my tongue. =)

Later on in the presentation he jumps back on the AJAX bandwagon to beat the horse some more and while showing a GridView control in a page states: “See this scrollbar with grid, this is all ajax …You can’t do this with any other programming language”, I correct him that the values he was changing within the grid was in fact AJAX because it was submitting behind the scenes, but the scrollbar was just a basic grid control that you can make with basic html. He cut me off and insisted again that the whole thing was AJAX. I just gave up at that point and listened to him ramble.

I had no idea that the “AJAX programming language” had arrived, Nor was I aware that this is now a buzzword that Sales guys use to sell software. Anything to get the dollars =)

After the meeting I was saying this to my boss and he says “That’s why he’s the sales guy”