Content Country-Formatnewsletter-Format Article for Newsletter

You Are Here: Home Page -> Formatnewsletter -> Format Article for Newsletter

Newsletter Article

Here is What You Need To Know About Ajax formatted for a newsletter with 65 characters per line.

Return to What You Need To Know About Ajax

What You Need To Know About Ajax

by rinpoche

You hear the word Ajax a lot these days, particularly in
technology, so; what are people talking about? A Greek hero from
the Odyssey - sure. A bathroom cleanser that gets your sink
sparkly - indeed. But today, more often then not, Ajax refers to
a specific type of web programming that has taken the internet by
storm.

The term Ajax was coined as shorthand for - Asynchronous
JavaScript and XML by a man named Jesse James Garrett who founded
a technical consultancy called Adaptive Path. He would want me to
make it clear that Ajax is not an acronym (so it isn't spelled
AJAX).

What Mr. Garrett described back in 2005 was a stack of
technologies (not a single technology) being used at the time by
very cutting-edge web sites. This stack of technologies allowed
web sites to be turned from a set of static documents connected
by hypertext links into something that approximated a true
application. This was the intellectual birth (or coming out party
anyway) of the Rich Internet Application (RIA).

At the heart of Ajax is a software object built into all
browsers called the XMLHttpRequest object. This mouthful is
frequently shortened to XHR for those that want to talk about it
in fewer syllables. This software object allows JavaScript code,
executed in the browser, to go out and request data from a server
without reloading a page.

This technology was not new in 2005, but Mr. Garrett put a
catchy name to it, and people noticed. Around the same time, a
number of web applications such as Gmail emerged and people
wondered, "how the heck did they do that?"

Think of a typical web page as one where you have to click a
link or submit a form then wait for a new page to be returned to
see your result. It's slow and doesn't really act the way we
expect software to act. Now look at web applications like Flickr,
Gmail, or Youtube. You can click in a box and enter some data,
and your updates happen without you leaving the page. The magic
that's happening in the background is Ajax (or and XRH call).

With Ajax, the idea is that you get a richer, faster user
experience. Properly implemented, a web page can become a rich
internet application (RIA). Most extremely popular web sites use
Ajax to some degree. Amazon's rating system, where you click on
the number of stars you give a book or CD is one example.

Even though Ajax and XMLHttpRequest both refernce XML, the data
that is used does not necessarily have to be formatted as XML. In
fact, more and more other data formats, such as JavaScript Object
Notation (JSON), are being used. One restriction on XHR is called
the single origin policy. This is a security policy, enforced by
the browsers, that only allows JavaScript to request data from
the server that originally served up a page. There is a technique
using JSON that get around this restriction.

Since 2005 a number of toolkits have emerged that have allowed
web developers to more easily implement Ajax in their
applications. Some of these are Dojo, Prototype, jQuery, GWT,
YUI... and many many others.

As a technology stack, Ajax is now quite mature and being used
almost everywhere on the web. Ultimately, the most important
thing to remember is to create the best posisble user experience.

John Moore is a Web 2.0 expert who creates Rich Internet
Applications. He has created the web's first RIA community at <a
href="http://www.riaspot.com" title="Rich Internet Application
Social Networking">http://www.riaspot.com</a>

Syndicated by Top Gazebos - www.topgazebos.net

Quick Content Search:
Content Country

Welcome Guest

Author Country

Publisher Country

Essentials