Once upon a time - in a world before MashupCamps and online widget platforms like live.com, before Google's personalized homepage and pageflakes, and before JSON, Comet, Dojo, and Apache Derby - there was a term "DHTML" (for dynamic HTML). It was used, as Wikipedia reminds us, for "a collection of technologies, used together to create interactive and animated web sites by using a combination of static markup language (such as HTML), a client-side scripting language (such as JavaScript), the presentation definition language (e.g. Cascading Style Sheets [CSS]), and the Document Object Model."

Recent history has proved that "DHTML" was one letter too many, that the world prefers snappy acronyms to klunky initialisms. Plus there was the small matter of how DHTML scripts often tended to not work well cross-platform.

Now that very same approach - JavaScript, CSS, and the DOM, plus the secret sauce of the XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with the web server - is, as we all know, named "AJAX." And this four-letter word, and the approach it crystallizes, has catalyzed a profound transformation in the way that users and businesses alike are going to be using the Web.

Without getting into the debate of whether "Web 2.0" is a useful term for that transformation or not, the undeniable fact is that something big is happening, just fifteen years after Tim (now Sir Tim) Berners-Lee made public a little project he called the World Wide Web. And that it involves, if not AJAX, then some kind of similar approach: which is why we at SYS-CON Media are confident that what you are holding in your hands is the first issue of a new magazine destined to grow, widen and deepen in the very best tradition of SYS-CON's market-leading titles like Java Developer's Journal, SOA Web Services Journal, Web Developer's & Designer's Journal, and Enterprise Open Source Magazine.

It is also why we at SYS-CON Events are proud to be bringing you the first AJAXWorld Conference & Expo - at which you may well be reading this copy of AJAXWorld Magazine. Few technologies this young achieve the two milestones of a totally dedicated magazine and a totally dedicated conference and trade show, all within less than 18 months of their creation. But then AJAX, as the contributors to this premier issue remind us time and time again, is an approach not a technology.

It is an approach whose time has come. It now has even reached a third milestone, that of having a major cross-industry body formed because of it, and to help guide and inform its penetration and adoption - in this case, the OpenAjax Alliance.

You can find out more about that from our cover story, "The OpenAjax Technology Vision." Just as you can find out more about myriad other aspects of AJAX and Rich Internet Applications in the one hundred pages which follow - our largest-ever premier issue in the thirteen-year history of the company.

I look forward to seeing the magazine flourish, and am honored that right from the get-go we secured Dion Hinchcliffe to be its Editor-in-Chief. Many of you will know Dion from his significant footprint in the blogosphere, and you will be able to infer - rightly - that the articles and features published in AJAXWorld Magazine under his custodianship will never be anything less than technically astute and/or strategically prescient, while all the time being anchored by two things: a preference for actionable software over whiteboard-ware…and the all-important centrality of the user.

Take it away, Dion!