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What is Ajax?

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Ajax and javascript are great for creating dynamic web applications, but before we discuss the AJAX let us first talk about how the browser works.

The browser gets information to display a page. How does it work? When a browser request a page from the website the browser in your computer is acting as a client, then the requested page from a site is being delivered through another network that is working up the information, so we call that a server. See how that works the client requests page from the server then the server returns the page that was requested by its clients.

AJAX is a technology that lets you build pages that updates without needing a page to reload

Sometimes when you are looking at a page you may want to ask for some additional information from the server say for example, that your page has thumbnails for a photo album and perhaps the album has more thumbnails that you can view in the current page. If without AJAX and want to see more thumbnails, you’d have to make a call back to the server. Also, it would send you a whole new page with additional thumbnails that mean the server ends up throwing a lot of information that you don’t need at all over again. With ajax the server doesn’t need to send you back the whole page it carries the pieces you need in these new thumbnails.

AJAX is not an individual technology, but a group of technologies is working together to make those stuff happen. Technically AJAX stands for Asynchronous, Javascript, and XML that’s quite a mouthful word. The Asynchronous means that the client can request new pieces of information from the server at any time it doesn’t have to wait for a page to reload. A new request will trigger by an event like clicking on a button, hovering over an image or whenever the event happened.

 

 

 

The J in AJAX stands for Javascript. Javascript is where all this magic takes place it handles the events that trigger a new request, requests a fresh data to the server, and making cares of updating the only piece of document that wants to change.

Javascript reports to the server through a set of programming methods called an API and used what’s called an XHR or XML HTTP request this is where the X in AJAX comes. The XHR API lets the browser sends and request data from a server this can be a little complicated because a lot of people think XML is a language used to describe data that’s a much similar to HTML. Sometimes people think that the X in AJAX indicates that the data from an AJAX request should to be in XML. But the data that gets transported to and from a server that can be in any format, and it’s usually either a text file HTML or a Javascript object like JSON, so AJAX is just a fancy term for this technology.

Again AJAX is a technology that lets you build pages that updates without needing a page to reload. Javascript seems most of the heavy lifting with AJAX, and it uses the XHR API, that can be in any format, to handle the communication between the client and the server.

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