Almost anyone who writes about Internet technologies, or i-Technology in shorthand, runs into a problem area from time to time concerning the issue of what in the i-Technology world was invented by whom?

Take Java, for example. No sooner does a commentator refer to James Gosling as "The Father of Java" than he gets 25 e-mails pointing out that the genesis of the programming language known originally as "Oak" was collective…and that, in any case, Gosling didn't name it, Sun's product management and marketing folks did. Or try calling Tim Bray "The Father of XML" and you'll get a similar e-mail, most likely from Tim himself, underlining the contributions of other eminent people in the XML community, such as Sun's Jon Bosak and Yuri Rubinski, a pre-eminent figure in the development and acceptance of SGML.

Recently I mentioned Adam Bosworth as the "Father" of Google's AJAX-based apps like Gmail and Google Maps, and Adam was quick to correct me. He would accept that he perhaps "godfathered" AJAX at Google, but denied outright paternity and hastened to remind me to give proper credit to progenitors like Paul Rademacher (Google Maps) and Paul Buchheit (Gmail).

Is this professional modesty a unique characteristic of software development? It's certainly refreshing: all the more kudos then to Bosworth, Bray, and top-flight professionals like them.

Last week, I was taken to task by Dave Carabetta in his blog for being one of the tens of thousands of people in the past 12 months to refer to Jesse James Garrett as the "Father" of AJAX. Dave didn't mention that in the full online announcement of SYS-CON's sell-out "Real-World AJAX" One-Day Seminar (www.ajaxseminar.com), this shorthand phrase is unpacked as "the man who first coined 'AJAX'" - instead he merely made the point, which is absolutely not in dispute, that Garrett is the one who coined the term AJAX "for an already-existing technology for asynchronously communicating with your server via JavaScript."

The issue of technology paternity is understandably a touchy one. Is David Heinemeier Hansson the "Father" of Ruby on Rails? Is Brian Behlendorf the "Father" of the Apache Web Server? Is Johann Gutenberg the "Father" of printing?

In the case of "AJAX," sometimes you might be forgiven for sensing a whiff of something almost akin to professional envy in the air, as if perhaps some developers resent that one little term, coined in one single essay (www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php), should have had such a disproportionate effect in galvanizing public, worldwide interest in an approach to technology that predated the term itself.

But word-magic often has a life of its own, in technology as in other walks of life, and Jesse James Garrett can hardly be blamed for being given due credit for fathering the term that he fathered just because it took off so spectacularly. Anyone who believes in the power of asynchronously communicating with your server via JavaScript ought to be pleased, not perturbed.

Besides, unlike "Java," for example, in the case of AJAX there is no paternity suit. Jesse James Garrett most certainly is the Father of "AJAX" - making him one of the few people alive to have watched the global success of an acronym in his own lifetime.