There is lots of hype out in the www about something called ajax. What exactly is it? Well according to wikipedia it basically “is a group of inter-related web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications”. What does that mean? Well lets see. Say you took a piece of paper, a pencil, a pen and some white out and put them into a little package that you decided to call “Papete”. You took exiting items and packaged them together an called it something different. Ajax is sort of like that. It took existing technologies, javascript, xml and asynchronism and called it ajax.
So what is ajax and what does it do? Well going back to the fictional “Papete” example. Say you sent the package to your friend Bob. Bob will take your items and create a masterpiece of an illustration for your business, with out the use of anything else except your items. He will have pictures of your business, your logo and text describing what you do. Bob sends you his work by mail. So say he sends you his first draft and has a couple mistakes, you correct the errors and send him a letter saying where exactly he messed up. Bob of course has to start from scratch again with only the items in the “Papete” package. Of course this will take time. So on his second draft he has more mistakes, the process repeats itself until eventually its perfect. And the process could pretty much keep going even if its perfect but you want to keep changing things in the illustration over time. This process of sending Bob the changes and Bob redoing the changes from scratch of course is time consuming and not really idealo. What if there was a better method.
What if you could just send the changes to Bob, and he magically does the changes on the first draft of the illustration. No need for him to start from scratch or anything. Once he reads the changes he magically makes the paper change to have the new changes even if he is not physically present where the paper is. For example say the illustration needs to change the Business name from ‘Bu’ to ‘Bo’. Once Bob reads the changes he magically somehow makes the illustration text read ‘Bo’ instead of ‘Bu’. So of course Bob has some really powerful powers if he can do this. This would saves tons of time and effort since all changes happen in that first draft.
Well what Bob does with his magic is pretty much what Ajax does for the internet. See every time you visit a page you are asking Bob(Your Browser) to send you a page. If you visit another page on the same site—nothing changes on the new page just the content) Bob sensd you the whole new page from scratch in a sense. So the browser is sorta stupid. It keeps re-drawing each illustration from scratch even thought there are only minor changes from one page of a site to another. So this is where the magic with ajax happens. Just as Bob was able to magically fix that element of part of the illustration that needed changing ajax does to web pages. Say you are viewing a gallery. Instead of asking your browser for a new page every time you want see the next picture you ask your browser to just change the picture element and nothing else. So instead of the browser fetching a new page each time( when nothing really changes between pages except the pic) with ajax the browse is able to just magically fetch the new picture and nothing else. So what is so special about this?
This means that just as Bob was able to save time by magically making changes, ajax allows web pages and web applications to saves tons of time by only changes parts of pages that need changing not the whole page.
Note:
This comparison between Bob and ajax is written for a quick explanation of ajax. For detailed information visit the wikipedia page found here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
Tags: ajax 101, ajax explained, what is ajax