Digital Shunya

What is AJAX?

October 25th, 2005

My development department now days buzzing with this question. From manager to trainee everyone want to know it, so I decided to write, what the hell AJAX is!

AJAX is Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Extensible Markup Language) with xmlhttprequest object. It’s a web development technique for creating dynamic interactive websites.

Note: The reason I specifically mentioned xmlhttprequest object because this is something that enable data exchange asynchronously with web server.

Basic AJAX components:

• XHTML/ HTML and CSS for page formatting.
  Note: XHTML is an advance version of HTML based on XML standards
• JavaScript using DOM (Document Object Model) to dynamically create the layout.
• Xmlhttprequest to exchange data with web server.

Oh … it’s not Google!

Many people relate AJAX with Gmail – an email application by Google. Though Gmail played a very important role in popularizing AJAX worldwide but still Google is not the one who developed it.

Not exactly a full fledge AJAX application but the first component to allow client side script to issue an xmlhttp request was written by Microsoft Outlook Team for Microsoft Exchange Server in 1998. Soon it was incorporated in Internet Explorer as well.

Internet Explorer also introduced the DHTML (Dynamic HTML) - which allows manipulation of DOM through JavaScript.

Why AJAX and why now?

During the past several years, internet has now become more important part of our life. From photo sharing to banking, from stock trading to online gaming, internet is now in almost every facet of our day to day living. But the problem is, though it’s everywhere but our web applications are still not advance enough to be called next generation.

AJAX is something which can revolutionize the way we interact and manage things on internet. What about an office application which you can access from anywhere to edit/email/print your documents OR what about a virtual desktop through which you can run application just like windows, but the difference is you can access it from anywhere.

I will term it as a Web 2.0 web development technique.

Note: Web 2.0 is not any term defined by W3C, it’s just a term given to technology that will fuel the internet tomorrow.

Entry Filed under: AJAX