Essential Knowledge - Ajax

Ajax, or AJAX, is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is intended to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, functionality, and usability.

The name is an acronym standing for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ajax is asynchronous in that loading does not interfere with normal page loading. JavaScript is the programming language that Ajax function calls are made in. Data retrieved using the technique is commonly formatted using XML, as reflected in the naming of the XMLHTTPRequest object from which Ajax is derived.

Ajax is a cross-platform technology usable on many different operating systems, computer architectures, and Web browsers as it is based on open standards such as JavaScript and XML, together with open source implementations of other required technologies.

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An ajax framework is a web application framework that helps to develop web applications that use Ajax, a technology to build dynamic web pages on the client side. Data is read from the server or sent to the server by JavaScript requests. However, some processing at the server side is required to handle requests, i.e., finding and storing the data. This is accomplished more easily with the use of a framework dedicated to process Ajax requests. In the article that coined the "Ajax" term, J.J. Garrett describes the technology as "an intermediary...between the user and the server." [1] This Ajax engine is intended to suppress waiting for the user when the page attempts to access the server. The goal of the framework is to provide this Ajax engine and associated server and client-side functions.

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