Ajax for Not Yet Techies

"Using Common Web Technologies and Server Side Scripting to Make Web Applications Act More Like Desktop Applications"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML

Ajax is basically an organized way of using commonly technologies to speed up web-based software applications so that they act more like desktop software applications.

What's the basic action you take when you want to do something? Clicking, right? You click on a link and then go to new page. Or you enter some information and the page refreshes and changes.

How much do you drag and drop on a web site? If you're like me, you don't even think of it. Until I heard of Ajax, I'd never even considered the differences between what I can do online and what I can do working with my PC's desktop.

Yet drag and drop and other useful functions can be done online, if you use Ajax:

Live searching -- connect with Google or other engine and the results are displayed right on the same page

Autocomplete -- That's when the software tries to complete what you're writing for you, based on the first letter or two you type in. I find this annoying but some people evidently like it.

Web chat -- Quicker and easier. Your friend's response shows right up on your screen

Gaming

Instant login feedback -- Isn't it annoying to try to login to some site or discussion group and you make an error and have to wait for the page telling you about it to load?

Ajax is able to do these things by combining common web technologies with using XML to store data on the web server. It consists of 3 parts:

1. Browser based presentation using XHTML and CSS. This just means, the results are shown on the web page you're viewing in your browser.

2. Data stored on server in XML format

3. XMLHttpRequest object is the programming that your browser uses to communicate behind the scenes with the web server.

4. JavaScript

You also need to use a server scripting language such as PHP (most common and now widely supported by web servers).

Common support of XML by web browsers is relatively new, but everything else dates to about 1998. Jesse James Garrett, in early 2005, was the first person to use the term Ajax to describe this systematic use of these technologies.

Two of the most well known sites using Ajax are Google Suggest and Google Maps.

Next: Asterisk

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