AJAX Introduction

AJAX is a technology for updating parts of a web page without reloading the whole page.

What is AJAX?

AJAX = Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.

AJAX is a technology for creating fast and dynamic web pages.

AJAX enables web pages to update asynchronously by exchanging small amounts of data with the server in the background. This means that parts of a web page can be updated without reloading the whole page.

Traditional web pages (that do not use AJAX) must reload the entire page if the content needs to be updated.

There are many application examples using AJAX: Google Maps, Gmail, Youtube, and Facebook.

How AJAX Works

AJAX

AJAX is Based on Internet Standards

AJAX is based on internet standards and uses the following combination of technologies:

  • XMLHttpRequest object (to interact with the server asynchronously)
  • JavaScript/DOM (display/retrieve information)
  • CSS (style the data)
  • XML (commonly used as the format for data transfer)

lampAJAX applications are browser and platform independent!

Google Suggest

With the release of Google Suggest in 2005, AJAX started to become popular.

Google SuggestAJAX creates extremely dynamic web interfaces: When you type content in Google's search box, JavaScript sends characters to the server, and the server returns a list of suggestions.

Start Using AJAX Today

In our ASP tutorial, we will demonstrate how AJAX updates parts of a web page without reloading the whole page. We will use ASP to write the server scripts.

If you want to learn more about AJAX, please visit ourAJAX Tutorial。

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