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What is AJAX? Why do I care?

July 25, 2011

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. It is a group of client-side web development techniques used to create interactive web pages and applications. Websites and web-based applications, can use AJAX to send and receive data from a server asynchronously (in the background) without having to reload the entire page. These methodologies make use of a browser's DOM (Document Object Model) in order to send data back and forth from the server and are natively supported by most commercial browsers.

AJAX allows webpages in a browser (such as Mozilla, Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc.) to update only the parts of a page that need to change instead of reloading the entire thing. This saves considerable time and processing power in that only a small piece of the page needs to be updated instead of submitting the entire page to the server, waiting for the server to process it, and then waiting for the server to push the page back out to the user.

So to summarize, AJAX makes webpages faster and more efficient which means you should be seeing the dreaded hourglass much less on an AJAX site.

Common uses for AJAX are validating and auto-completing online forms, instant messaging and virtual chat rooms, scrolling news and RSS feeds, e-commerce shopping carts and checkouts as well as streaming real-time weather and stock ticker updates. It's even used by Google Maps and numerous browser-based games.

It is also worth nothing that due to advancements in web development technologies, AJAX requires neither JavaScript nor XML to be used in the transfer of data as a number of programming languages now offer similar functionalites.
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