AJAX
What is AJAX?
AJAX - or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - is considered as a new term coined for a set of technologies that has existed for many years. AJAX is a big buzz word in the technology world right now. It’s popularity is due in part because of sites like Google Maps, Gmail and Google Suggest, although these are certainly not the first sites to make use of AJAX technologies.
THINK! programmers have successfully applied Ajax in a number of modules for web sites and applications such as demos, charts, maps, quotes, dynamic feeds, etc.
Ajax’s key benefit is the increased responsiveness and interactivity of web pages achieved by exchanging small amounts of data with the server “behind the scenes” so that entire web pages do not have to be reloaded each time there is a need to get data from the server.
This is intended to increase the web page’s interactivity, speed, functionality and usability.
For example, if a site is dynamic and only the main reading area changes frequently, the main reading area would be produced in ajax so that the full page would not need to reload all the data, only the data in the reading area. This is best demonstrated on Google’s Gmail. (We love Gmail)
