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What Is AJAX?

Posted By : mattyb 28th Mar 2007

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, Its main use is in the production on Internet Rich Applications. Imagine being able to influence a webpage with dynamic data without leaving the page. At present if you wish to have dynamic content on a website then you use a Server-Side scripting language like PHP or Active Server Pages but with these technologies you need to request a new page or refresh the current page. Now with AJAX you can use Server Side Scripting without leaving the page, the JavaScript does all the work for you!

How does AJAX work?

AJAX Flow Chart. Click for larger image

AJAX is mainly JavaScript and XML code, the JavaScript opens the page you want using the browsers XML connection, it waits until it gets a response and then launches more JavaScript in your code to handle the response, so an example of this would be a password box. Let us say for example, there is a section of your site you want hidden from everyone unless they type in a password. Using AJAX we can get the password the user types in, show then a please wait sign. Once there the Server-Side code checks if the password matches, if so the code then outputs the content we want the person to see. Using JavaScript we handle this response and see that the password is correct then display the response from the code.

How can I use AJAX on my site?

There are many uses for AJAX literally as many as you can image! Here at Paramiliar Design Studios we have converted several scripts to utilise the power of AJAX, these include the following

Members Registration and login form
Business card creation software
Who Is information on an IP Address or Domain Name
Search Engine Optimisation Wizard

Therefore, as you can see AJAX can really have as many uses as you want it to.

What is the benefit of using AJAX?

With AJAX you download the data that you need without any formatting, imagine if your template for your website was a total of 20Kb and the data you wanted to show was only 2Kb, without AJAX the person browsing your website would have to download a 22Kb file just to see the data you wanted to show him. Now with AJAX you would not need the template so you would only download a 2Kb data stream, which means faster loading for the person viewing your website, and it’s a lot friendlier on your bandwidth!

Well thats what AJAX is and how many uses it can have, I hope you enjoyed reading this article and stay tuned for the next installment.