I said that “Giving a stable technology a mystifying acronym may help on the marketing angle….But it's inherently deceptive. And dishonest. “

Indeed. And what's neat about Ajax under rails is that it's even more stable and less of an issue. The only difference between an ajax form and a standard form in ruby on rails is the function name and some other small things. There's no real clue that you're dealing with the XMLHttpRequest, Javascript, ajax, etc… because that's not needed. You just say, essentially, “I want a form that updates this section of a page” instead of “I want a form that updates the whole page.”

That is how technology should function: as intended, and not as a mystical collection of buzzwords.

[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2006/08/05/ajax-is-javascript-web-services.html