Andi Egloff's Weblog

What's in a Buzzword?

Ahhh, a virgin blog. Let's get to it.

I just had an interesting exchange that might have me re-consider my allergies to buzzwords.

It all started innocent enough as I called another architecture meeting where I was discussing the use of Comet and AJAX. After a few explanations and examples the leads seemed happy and excited about the match to their needs.

What is so thought provoking about this? Well, I had a very similar discussion nearly 3 years ago. There I was in a room with very accomplished developers, architects, book authors on all kinds of web and java topics - and I mostly got blank stares at the explanation of how we could essentially achieve "push" for events to our web GUI. I can't read minds, but I would bet if they didn't know me beforehand some of them would have thought this guy is nuts; everyone knows you don't push to web apps.

Now I might be giving a bit too much credit to the terms themselves, but it does seem that some of them help to understand, categorize, communicate - and propagate ideas. The other part probably is that there is more infrastructure support - and more applications of the idea, but ultimately I think the "hype" about a little acronym AJAX and (what I consider an extension of that idea) Comet pushed these long-standing ideas into the limelight.

A lot of buzzwords will over-sell and under-deliver, but in time the true colors typically start to show – and apparently there is an upside to that hype too.

Posted at 03:48PM Oct 02, 2006 by Andreas Egloff in Software Architecture  |  Comments[0]