AJAX: Who When Where What Why

Who & Where?

Before going into who actually discovered/invented Ajax, one thing you must know is that AJAX as the full name suggests is it actually is combination of JavaScript with further xml (DOM) support. Behind the scene there are many other technologies also like JSON, Prototype etc which makes full Ajax framework.

Now the connecting question arises who invented JavaScript?

‘Brendan Eich’ at Netscape originally invented a simple scripting language in 1995, called LiveScript. It was basically proprietary add-on to the HTML. With the growth of Sun’s new language, Java, gaining popularity, Netscape switched over and came up with a new scripting language called JavaScript. Here only the first four alphabets are common ‘Java’ otherwise they are completely different from each other. JavaScript added interactivity to previous boring dump HTML which made it so popular later on.

When:

When was Ajax released?

You can find details reading for when and whereabout of Ajax at my old post at this link. http://abhi-ajax.blogspot.com/2009/12/birth-of-ajax.html

What & Why:

What is Ajax and why it is used?

Anybody can program using the same old request/response model. But if you want faster apps that feel like you’re working on a desktop, you need something new—welcome to Ajax, a completely different approach to web programming:

AJAX is a combination of many technology put together to help building web based applications better and faster along with great user experience. JavaScript and XML are main technology used to provide interactive web applications. JavaScript uses XmlHTTPRequest object to exchange data asynchronously over the client and the server.

The biggest advantage of AJAX technology is that a webpage doesn’t have to be completely reloaded when user interacts and also that it works in background without the knowledge of user. JavaScript that runs in the background when u click on any button/event communicates with the server. Once the response is received only the part of the page which is needed to be changed is updated with the response (wow doesn’t have to wait for entire page to reload). Believe me it really hurts when your website’s full page is loaded (my office website + my company product does the same and I’ve seen the client reaction on the same. It sucks!! L)