AJAX is an emerging way to design applications that run inside a web browser. It's a way to make messaging web clients provide a much richer experience. Its key advantage over conventional web applications is that AJAX applications are much more responsive and interactive.
It's an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. What that means is that the underlying data are exchanged between the browser and web server in XML and the display intelligence runs in a JavaScript program (AKA ECMAScript: the scripting language, not Java). The program is downloaded when the browser first connects to the web server.
A relevant example of a good AJAX application is Scalix Web Access (SWA). This alternative to Outlook is extremely fast, compared with the current Outlook Web Access and provides a comprehensive list of functionality, including email, calendar, scheduling, tasks, contacts, delegation, and public folders. Another example is Google's GMail, although the Gmail paradigm is a little too page-based for AJAX purists.
To contrast a conventional web application with an AJAX application:
Conventional:
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AJAX:
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... Richi Jennings
One Comment
You might be interested in some experiments I did on offline AJAX: https://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000272.html