AJAX Pointers for You and Me

J.K. · 1st June 2005, 12:00 AM

Quote:

AJAX AJAX AJAX. Every time I turn around I hear AJAX. This is as bad as 2002 when every time turned around I heard RSS.

Except in 2002 I had already been using RSS for two years. AJAX I don't know too much about, so this post is a brain marker for me with some pointers to resources I can use to read more about AJAX:

links on site

Man, does that ever describe me.. It's even possible that I may have placed this in the wrong forum. If so, please feel free to move, Tech.

Being true to my slacker self I have to admit that I haven't exerted much energy reading the info about this. I've taken a brief look at some links but after doing so I quickly realized that what I wanted was a more personal explanation from someone who could give me the skinny on it in layman's speak.

That said, has anyone here taken the dive into AJAX? Is it something that's actually 'new' that we should be looking at? Or it it just a new buzz word for existing technologies packaged in a new way?

**Mr. Tech** · 1st June 2005, 09:19 AM

Hey J.K.

I think AJAX is a client side language.

Quote:

AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a term describing a web development technique for creating interactive web applications using a combination of:

HTML (or XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets for presenting information
Document Object Model, JavaScript to dynamically display and interact with the information presented
XML, XSLT and the XMLHttpRequest object to interchange and manipulate data asynchronously with the web server (although AJAX applications can use other technologies, including preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON (http://www.crockford.com/JSON/index.html) and JSON-RPC (http://oss.metaparadigm.com/jsonrpc/) as alternatives to XML/XSLT).

Like DHTML or LAMP, AJAX is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together. In fact, derivative/composite technologies based substantially upon AJAX, such as AFLAX are already appearing.

AJAX applications use web browsers that support the above technologies as a platform to run on. Browsers that support these technologies include Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Konqueror and Safari. Please note: "Opera does not support XSL formatting objects, and neither does it natively support XSLT transformations" (http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/).

More info can be read at the Wikipedia.

I personally have only just heard of it. It looks very clever. Some key points:

vBulletin will be using it in their next version. Here's a demo.
Google are using it also so it must mean it's quite stable.
It's been tested on all the major browsers.

Yes, it uses existing languages but in a better way. It allows developers to create rich, fast-responding interactive pages. Instead of having the load another page to send data it does the opposite... It sends data without reloading the page. I'll have to do more reading to find out what else it does...

But who knows if it's just a new 'buzz word' like you said... I don't think it is but it might... I'm going to have a look around for some scripts to test out

Sorry about all the writing...

J.K. · 1st June 2005, 02:50 PM

Thanks tech. And don't mind the writing.. I lneed it long.. lol

Your post also helped. I don't completly understand it yet but it sounds like this would be riddled with indexing problems in terms of the search engines. If there are basically two pages rendering on the same URL, how's a spider to know which one to index?

Perhaps I just don't understand it yet. But if I'm getting close to understanding I think there are going to be a lot of things for us to talk about..

**Mr. Tech** · 1st June 2005, 02:58 PM

Actually you are correct... I didn't think of that.

Maybe the search engines will be able to work there way around it? They did it with flash. Maybe the content loaded by "AJAX" might have it's own URL for the SE's? E.g: page.php?ajax=showthenewpage

Maybe AJAX with just be used to edit part of websites that don't require to be indexed... But I highly doubt it... If you hear anything about that please do let me know