I have lots of clients who want AJAX on their site. They don’t necessarily know what it *is*, but they want it. I don’t blame them. This post is an attempt at explaining the magic behind AJAX, or at least, detailing what it is.
AJAX is not such a hot topic right not, but it is still very much on the minds of businesspeople with friends who are “in the know”. It is not a panacea for your web-based woes, but AJAX is pretty cool.
Developers were using AJAX before it was called AJAX. AJAX means “Asynchronous JavaScript And XML”. JavaScript and XML have been used together to perform AJAX functionality since ~2003, but the term “AJAX” wasn’t invented until two years later. Jesse Garret first used the term in public after coming up with the acronym to explain an idea to one of his clients.
AJAX inst a brand new technology. It is the combination of two technologies for a specific purpose. Instead of having to reload an entire page to update one page of the page – say, your RSS feeds (as formerly on the MIT Technical homepage) – you can create a little container that uses JavaScript to call XML to the specific container. The screen will not refresh, the “container” will refresh. This is made possible through the XMLHttpRequest object and of course, asynchronous JavaScript and XML.
This is admittedly fairly technical, but I wanted to write a quick entry about AJAX because I just got off the phone with someone who was throwing the term around like it was a movie star’s name and we were in Hollywood trying to get a table at a restaurant.
As a last note, if you have AJAX displaying data or copy on your page, you should have a static version of that data or copy as well. Search engine systems will not execute the JavaScript that your AJAX requires and therefore will not index it.
Josh Milane