What is Ajax?
Website design basics
Ajax is created from a combination of web development techniques which are interrelated in producing client side web applications. Ajax provides web applications that provide processing of input/output before a transmission has completed (Asynchronous I/O). This allows for faster results while data passes to and from a server.
Ajax is an acronym for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It combines HTML, CSS, XML, XMLHttpRequest, JavaScript and DoM(Document Object Model) technologies to produce mark up styles, dynamic displays and user interactions.
What does AJAX do?
AJAX was developed as a solution to the problems caused by having to reload entire HTML pages from the server whenever a partial change occurred on a webpage. The user experience was effected by the load put on the server and the bandwith required.
AJAX uses the following technologies for web development:
HTML or XHTML: For webpage structure.
CSS: For presentation of web pages.
DOM (Document Object Model): To provide interaction with data and dynamic display.
XML and XSLT: For the interchange and manipulation of data.
XMLHttpRequest: To provide asynchronous activities on a website.
JavaScript: To provide a control of the combination of all these technologies.
Following the adoption of the ‘XMLHttpRequest JavaScript object’ by Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and other browsers; adoptions by Outlook Web App, Gmail and Google maps; the term AJAX was applied to the technology in 2005 in a news article about Google pages by Jesse James Garrett.
W3C released a specification for the XMLHttpRequest object as a web standard in 2006. This became the AJAX programming technique that has been widely adopted throughout the internet.
Ajax as a term is often updated to incorporate new technologies and recent developments have preferred to use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) as an alternative to XML and XSLT for data interchange.