Yeah... giving them the benefit of the doubt, that's misleading wording: XMLHttpRequest is an object in the JS namespace as of IE7. Before that, you needed to import an ActiveX Object, which has supported requestXML since MSXML 2.0 (that's IE5). See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms757066(VS.85).aspx
JavaScript's syntax is less like Java's than any other popular language that idiomatically uses curly-braces to delimit blocks.
Hamster starts with Ham, but they are as unrelated as two things can be that exist in the same broad category (flesh).