ajax

Ajax is the acronym for asynchronous JavaScript and XML and is one of the main usage technique in web 2.0. It is highly helpful in loading the data onto the browser and enables the user to get that interactive nature of the web 2.0. In commercial applications, by the virtue of Ajax, the user can customize the reports as she or he wants it. It was made very popular by the Google with Google suggest. Ajax is not a new programming language but a new way to use the existing standards which enables you to create better, faster and more user friendly web applications.

Coming to the technicality of Ajax - it is is a group of interrelated web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. Ajax enables the web applications to retrieve data from the remote server not in the conventional way of loading all the information at one go, but those data that is requested only in an asynchronous manner. Data is retrieved by the use of remote scripting or the XMLHttp Request Object


The first coinage of the term was done in the article written by Jesse James Garreet who explained how it is used

While XHTML and CSS are used for presentation, the document object model is used for the dynamic display, and XML for interchange and XSLT for manipulation of data, and XMLHttpRequest object for asynchronous communication. The JavaScript helps bring all these technologies together. Even VBScript is also capable of doing the same functionality.
The main Advantages comes where the pages on a website consist of much content that is common between them. Using traditional methods, that content would have to be reloaded on every request. However, using Ajax, a web application can request only the content that needs to be updated, thus drastically reducing bandwidth usage and load time. The use of asynchronous requests allows the client's Web browser UI to be more interactive and to respond quickly to inputs, and sections of pages can also be reloaded individually. Users may perceive the application to be faster or more responsive, even if the application has not changed on the server side. The use of Ajax can reduce connections to the server, since scripts and style sheets only have to be requested once

The main Disadvantages of not being in a position to create a history or bookmark the page and the dynamically loaded/changed state can be overcome by only workarounds.
Any user whose browser does not support Ajax or JavaScript, or simply has JavaScript disabled, will not be able to use its functionality.

In the next post, let me write some more in depth about Ajax