AJAX

My friend Dejan said to me the other day: “Great, now I have one more abbreviation to add to my resumé”. What he was talking about? AJAX
(Asynchronous JavaScript + XML), which basically means loading data in
the background and then show/update it on-the-fly using scripting. This
is something that I (and many others) have personally done for years,
but now it’s got a brand new name to describe it and a hype to go with
it.

Since it consists of already existing teqhniques, it’s just
a matter of branding. I think it’s good that it gets hyped and has
gotten a new name to market. Used the correct way and during suitable
circumstances, it can certainly enhance the user experience.

Some high-attention web sites have been built like this (although not all of these use the XML part). I also read a very-well written article about AJAX on Quirksmode, and he brings the attention to a very important part of this: accessibility.

I
do think it is an interesting way of doing it, and I hope the hype
makes it easier to persuade/convince project managers to allow its
usage in appropriate web sites.
What do you think?

PS. Have a nice weekend, I’ll write more on Monday. DS.

7 Comments

  • Dejan says:

    I am using this "new" technology for some time now. A few years ago I started learning SOAP but then discovered XML-RPC and liked it more because of its simplicity.

    AJAX

    is making pages more interactive, being especially effective for

    visitors with narrower bandwidth, and for those with higher connection

    speed, web applications can really compete with winforms. Lately, most

    notable use of this technology is being presented on Google Suggest,

    where sugestions fetched from Google database of keywords are presented

    (and autocompleted) as you type. That is really impressive. You can

    also find it on other Google sites such as Maps and Gmail.

    Besides

    being really cool and usable, this technique is having one aspect that

    is mainly unnoticed – saving bandwidth. Since noone of us is ever

    satisfied with speed of his/hers internet connection, in the long term

    this could bring huge savings in traffic, especially taking into

    account that ASP.NET introduced viewstate that sometimes can make your

    pages really bulky and server roundtrips rather expensive.

  • Robert says:

    Dejan,

    I haven't really considered the bandwidth issue. Interesting to hear!

  • Robert says:

    As a sidenote, I just have to add this link Dejan sent me:

    Google Suggest Dissected….

  • Rimantas says:

    I'd say most notable use is in Gmail.

  • Robert says:

    Yes, Gmail is a very nice one!

  • Johan says:

    I heard .NET will fix everything, no more javascript is needed :-))

  • Robert says:

    Kind of hard to deliver content on-the-fly without scripting, don't you think? 🙂

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