Web Programming with AJAX
The utilization of AJAX in web development process is relatively new compared to HTML and Javascript. AJAX is a combination of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, hence it is not a new programming or scripting language. Instead, it utilizes the existing standards and languages and incorporates them into one standard to develop interactive web applications. Other than Javascript and XML, other languages such as CSS and Document Object Model (DOM) are also incorporated in AJAX. Simply put, with the help of AJAX, one can exchange data with the server and update specific parts of a webpage, without taking the trouble of reloading the entire page. This means that exchange of selected amount of data with server is made possible.
Scripting languages such as VBScript and Javascript can be used to implement the client-side functionality of the AJAX applications. The encoding of AJAX is quite similar to HTML and Javascript since they are mainly utilized in it. Consider a short example:
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<p><html><br /> <body></p> <p><div id="myID"><h3>Changing text with AJAX</h3></div><br /> <button type="button" onclick="loadXMLDoc()">Change Content</button></p> <p></body><br /> </html></p> |
The above code is used within HTML tags. Two worth-noting tags appear in the above code: div and button. The div tag is used to display information retrieved from the serve, while button tag, upon being clicked, calls a function named loadXMLDoc(). The loadXMLDoc() function is implemented in the head section of the code. For example, the code:
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<head><br /> <script type="text/javascript"><br /> function loadXMLDoc()<br /> {<br /> .... AJAX script goes here ...<br /> }<br /> </script><br /> </head> |
Is used for the implementation of loadXMLDoc().
Web programming with AJAX is very powerful and AJAX applications have proven to be quite successful. One example of such applications is Google Maps. The advantage of programming in AJAX is that it utilizes the existing standards and hence there isn’t any need to define and implement new standards. AJAX is not only browser independent, it is also perfectly compatible with any standard Web server and server-side language such as PHP, ASP. ASP.Net, Perl, JSP, Cold Fusion – to name a few.
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