Everything I Know About Anything

It's that damn AJAX. It's so hot right now.

Might as well credit my source at the beginning.

Asynchronous Javascript and XML, not the Greek hero. From what I know about AJAX before reading Wikipedia it allows smooth refreshing of pages, reloading only the parts that change. The server sends only a small bit of data to the browser.

Excerpted from Wikipedia
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AJAX, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability. The first known use of the term in public was by Jesse James Garrett in his February 2005 article Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications. At subsequent talks and seminars Jesse James has made the point that Ajax is not an acronym.

The Ajax technique uses a combination of:

• XHTML (or HTML), CSS, for marking up and styling information.
• The DOM accessed with a client-side scripting language, especially ECMAScript implementations such as JavaScript and JScript, to dynamically display and interact with the information presented.
• The XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with the web server. In some Ajax frameworks and in certain situations, an IFrame object is used instead of the XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data with the web server.
• XML is sometimes used as the format for transferring data between the server and client, although any format will work, including preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON and even EBML.

Like DHTML, LAMP, or SPA, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together.

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Used ubiquitously by web apps that call themselves Web2.0. Another typical sign of Web2.0, that the site can be called an application or a service provided online.

posted by albert @ 6:57 PM