General Information Information on all the Latest General Topics

The Ajax Definition

Ajax is an acronym. It is actually the shortened version of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ajax is a technique used in web programming and development in order to create fully interactive web pages and applications. It became popular in 2005 through Google Suggest.

Incidentally, Ajax is not a new programming language. Instead, it is an improvement of languages that was popularly used by webmasters. It uses a combination of different web service applications so that a website or an internet-related application will be developed to be more user-friendly. Using Ajax can actually increase the interactivity of a website, as well as its usability and speed.

Ajax is a blend of different web applications and programming such as HTML or XHTML and CSS. These two are usually used for styling information and marking up. DOM, if used with a client side scripting language like JScript and JavaScript, is also an example. This mix is commonly employed by webmasters to produce a website that is highly interactive and has a dynamic display.

The use of Ajax technology on a website has its advantages. Besides to maximize user interface, it is also used to reduce bandwidth utilization. With Ajax, web pages load faster because the page’s payload is made smaller in size. Ajax may seem to be a clutter of programming techniques and languages to some. But using it in such as way that the function, style, format, and data obtained by the website are separated, then the whole thing would work better. Consequently, revision will be easier in the future.

Even if Ajax can work superiorly for a website, there are disadvantages to using it as well. For one, the pages are dynamically created. This means that the pages won’t register or integrate into the history of the browser. So when the user click on the “Back” button to go to their previously viewed page, it won’t load as expected. Users would either need to type the whole URL string again or click “Back” then refresh the browser.

Ajax is based on JavaScpript. And mainly because of that, it has to be tested and tried with all types of browsers for compatibility issues before it is fully implemented. A certain code may work for Mozilla, but it may not on Internet Explorer. And to address this issue, a different code has to be created for each of these browsers. Consequently, it is also important for website users and visitors to have their browser’s java script functions enabled. Otherwise, the application won’t run and they would have trouble viewing the page.