CONSULTING

AJAX

The term was coined by Jesse Garrett, in 18 February 2005. Ajax, acronym of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique for creating web interactive applications. The intention of such a technique is that of obtaining web pages which respond in a more rapid way, thanks to the exchange in background of little date packages with the server, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded every time the user carries out a modification. This technique manages, therefore, to improve the interactivity, the speed and the usability of a web page.

The concept behind the initials AJAX is not so new. In fact, its origins go back to 1998 when Microsoft carried out its first experiments with Remote Scripting trying to create a form of communication of push type with the information on the server. It is in this way that the object XMLHttpRequest, the true core of AJAX technology was born.

Ratifying the success of this technology is its use by Google for the Google Mail and Google Maps projects. The AJAX technique uses a combination of:

HTML (or XHTML) and CSS for the mark-up and the style;
DOM (Document Object Model) manipolato attraverso un linguaggio ECMAScript come JavaScript o JScript per mostrare le informazioni ed interagirvi;
The XMLHttpRequest object for this asynchronous exchange of data between the user’s browser and the web server. In some Ajax frameworks and in certain situations, an Iframe object can be used instead of XMLHttpRequest to exchange data with the server and, in other implementations, tag <script> added dynamically (JSON)
The XMLHttpRequest object for this asynchronous exchange of data between the user’s browser and the web server. In some Ajax frameworks and in certain situations, an Iframe object can be used instead of XMLHttpRequest to exchange data with the server and, in other implementations, tag <script> added dynamically (JSON)

Like DHTML or LAMP, Ajax is not an individual technology; rather it is a group of technologies used together.