Ajax

If you have ever used Google Suggest you will appreciate why AJAX looks so promising.

The functionality do do this has actually been around a long time, since Internet Explorer 6 I believe. What it enables you to do is make HTTP requests to the server in the background using Javascript. As it uses Javascript, the request can be invoked by any event on the page.Once the request has been made, the Javascript can pick up the response as either plain text or XML.

This enables you to update only the areas of the page which require updating and doesn't require that the user reload the entire page and all its content. In my opinion, a web site implementing AJAX in their pages will not only save a lot of bandwidth, but also create sleeker
experience for their users.

I did some playing around with AJAX today, creating a simple form with a PHP back end. It is very simple and just asks questions, but you'll notice it is HTML and the page never loads. I hope that once I get the current phase of my works website done, I can have a go at using AJAX
there. Anyway, this is my little test:

http://adam.codedv.com/examples/ajax_form/ajax_form.html

The age of true event driven client server apps which run in the browser are upon us.