What is AJAX?
AJAX is an acronym for Asynchronous
JavaScript and XML. Most people falsely believe it is a new
programming language or special technology. In fact, there is
nothing new about it, except that progrmamers are getting better at
using these technologies together, and it has recently grown popular
enough to reach the public eye and warrant its own acronym.
JavaScript
is a language that is read by your browser while surfing the
Internet. As websites have become increaingly dynamic, it has
become necessary to "stream" information back and forth between the web
server and your browser, thereby preventing you from having to reload
the entire page just because you clicked your country name on a web
form, for example. A great example of how AJAX improves your User
Experience is GMail from Google.
The
same methodologies as AJAX can also be used with other
technologies. One other popular combination that should have
deserved its own acronym long before AJAX, is using dynamic Flash
applications with streaming XML. Let's call it FLAX. This has been possible since the advent of ActionScript 2.0 in Flash version 6.0, and is used more widely than AJAX.
FLAX
can trump AJAX one step further by establishing peer-to-peer
connections streaming XML data back and forth, which means the server
is not handling the streaming XML data. A good use for this would
be chat rooms, video conferencing, and content sharing.
Macromedia offers a product to do this called Flash Remoting, but that
requires an expensive Cold Fusion server to run. Instead,
consider the free open source library AMFPHP which can achieve the same
results.
