A Look At AJAX: What is it?

In the internet world of Web2.0, you've probably heard something about AJAX. After all, it would be pretty hard to not have heard of it if you're a webmaster, designer or developer. However, I've found that many people don't have a full understanding of what AJAX is, can do, and what the benefits and drawbacks are. I have to say, I'm one of these people, as I know something about it, but definately could learn some more.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be taking time to learn some more about AJAX myself, and sharing my journey with all of you, much like I did more succintly with CSS last year. Hopefully, you'll learn a little bit from this as I do.

Let's start with "What AJAX Is". AJAX is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, meaning that it is a web development technique, not a new programming language. The use of JavaScript and XML also means that any modern web browser and web server should provide the basic support needed to implement AJAX code.

Typically, when you place a link on a page, it leads to another full page. So even if 90% of the content is the same, the whole new page needs to be sent by the server and processed by the browser. What is unique about AJAX is that it allows you to focus that link to only update a certain portion of the page. So with AJAX, if you only want to update that 10% of the page, you can, saving bandwidth.

AJAX is also nothing new, as many of it's features have been available to developers for nearly a decade now. Out of the roots of Remote Scripting, the process slowly developed until the term AJAX was coined by Jesse James Garrett in 2005.

When used right, these calls can also make a page much more interactive, with features like search-term suggestions, tooltips, or even whole sites contained in the framework of a single page. What this does is open up more atypical page design options for us web people to work with and explore, and we're just begging to see where those options will lead us in the future.

Next week, we'll take a look more closely at the benefits and drawbacks of using AJAX, so be sure to check in then.