You know when you consider buying a certain model of car, you begin to see that model everywhere? I recently experienced that same phenomenon, yet with a recent Internet buzz word, Ajax. A business associate of mine asked me to speak to emerging trends, specifically Ajax, and it had me stumped at first. Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.

I first had to look it up, and then realized I have been using it for quite some time and didn’t know they had a “word” for it - specifically dynamic display of data within a web page without requiring an expensive “refresh”. The most popular implementations today are using hidden iframes to allow the browser back button functionality (like Google Maps), and the XMLHttpRequest object to send GET or POST requests to a remote URI and “handle” the results.

Check out Wikipedia’s information about it: Ajax overview.

This site’s calendar uses Ajax to switch months without a page refresh, loading xml data for each month’s archives and dynamically generating the calendar code. In addition, my e-commerce business’ administration uses Ajax for our user-friendly content editor. Well now, Ajax is actually the solution for a prototype I’m having built, to allow some browser functionality that was thought “impossible”.

In the matter of a week, Ajax went from “what’s that” to “that’s what we have to do” - I have no idea how these things occur, but it’s a good thing people like my associate are around to challenge others and promote intelligent discussion and research.

Check back after New Years for a cool announcement regarding Goomzee.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2005 at 1:44 am and is filed under Knowledge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. This post has been viewed 1,016 times.