AJAX is a group of web development techniques using many web technologies like HTML, CSS, DOM, JSON or XML, and JavaScript together to create asynchronous web applications. It allows updating parts of a web page without reloading the entire page. AJAX development began in the 1990s and was renamed by Jesse James Garret in 2005 after technologies like XMLHttpRequest were introduced. AJAX provides benefits like more interactivity, faster websites, and reduced server traffic by allowing JavaScript processing on the client-side. Some disadvantages are browser compatibility issues and problems with reloading and backward navigation.