AJAX the future web development langauge

[Web_Designer]

For the past few weeks now I have been successfully studying the art of AJAX. (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) a website programming language which has become very popular in the past couple of years.

It allows a more fluid user experience for visitors to your site.

Rather than having to wait for the page to refresh when they click a link or form button, AJAX simply updates only the area on the page that requires it.

There is no point refreshing the whole page, as most of the text and images will remain unchanged when a link or button is pressed.

AJAX makes a quicker, smoother user-friendlier web experience. You have probably seen this yourself when clicking a form submit button and instead of the page disappearing then reappearing you just get a swirling GIF image informing you to wait which then changes to a success message.

I don’t see AJAX completely replacing less time consuming languages like PHP, but the thing I like about AJAX is it will work with any number of existing languages like PHP, ASP, JavaScript, XML without to much fuss.

I am now using AJAX for my clients website developments for areas such as form submission and image uploads. Also I am going to add quite a lot of AJAX in to the CMS side of my future builds.

If you are looking to add bespoke interactivity to your website, like forms, guest books, blogs, login area, portfolios, products or services databases, e-commerce, in fact pretty much any type of website or database function then give me a call for a low cost web development quote.

Sorry I don’t install ready made templates, I only do bespoke work.

 

[Gordon N]

There is no point refreshing the whole page, as most of the text and images will remain unchanged when a link or button is pressed.

I too am a fan of AJAX and the power that using it with frameworks such as JQuery brings, but like flash it should be used in moderation. I disagree slightly with the 'no point refreshing' as I believe in some cases it is useful to have the refresh - for example tracking views of a form confirmation page in analytics. At least then you can tell how many times a form has been completed rather than you contact form becoming an exit page without knowing whether its being used.

I am looking into more advanced ways of dealing with trackers within analytics that may enable tracking without refresh though... should be blogging on it soon on my site if your interested.

 

[Mike Lewis]

I agree with both of you.

But just to clarify a point .... AJAX is not a language, and it's definitely not an alternative to PHP, ASP or anything similar. It's best described as a combination of technologies, but it doesn't replace any of the existing server-side languages.

Mike

 

[Gordon N]

AJAX is not a language

Absolutely! It is an method of using (or implementation) of javascript used to interact with the DOM and access external resources/files in an asynchronous way. The language is javascript.

One thing worth noting on the forms side of things...

You should never rely on javascript alone for form validation or similar functions. It is nowhere near as secure or safe as server side validation, which should always be used in all cases.

If an end user has javascript disabled the validation won't run and anything could be passed through to the handling scripts!

This also applies to *any* functionality that is applied using AJAX/Javascript, it is important that everything degrades gracefully should the user have javascript disabled, or be browsing from a non-javascript supportive browser (such as many mobile phones etc).

 

[Neil Ballantyne]

Absolutely! It is an method of using (or implementation) of javascript used to interact with the DOM and access external resources/files in an asynchronous way. The language is javascript.

or VBScript

This also applies to *any* functionality that is applied using AJAX/Javascript, it is important that everything degrades gracefully should the user have javascript disabled, or be browsing from a non-javascript supportive browser (such as many mobile phones etc).

Completely agree. I like AJAX too but only where it's an add-on, and the underlying site still works with client side scripting disabled.

Not just from a security point of view, for most sites you want search engine crawlers to be able to access the content too.

 

[terinea]

We develop a lot of stuff using Google Web Toolkit. You code in Java and then GWT translates it into JavaScript and Java Server Pages.

If your a Java programmer its well worth a look at.

GWT-Ext Showcase