by Emmanuel D. on August 28, 2011
We often wonder about the big fuzz of the AJAX technology and it simplifies work on our Network Solutions sites but most often we also scratches ahead what exactly AJAX is made of and made for.
AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. The term was coined for AJAX platform is the product of different technologies and the prominent of it were the JavaScript and XML. Si if that’s the case then why not just use JavaScript or XML? That would be a lot easier. I also ask that question when I was in College and my strong feat was on JavaScript. Our web instructor at that time told me that AJAX is not a single stuff and using it would mean handful of web stuffs are at your disposal.
I have been an IT instructor and a web specialist and indeed AJAX is not just a single technology and also more than a handful of web technologies. It actually incorporates the following web platforms to come up a more robust yet simple web frame work:
- XHTML for the markup of web pages
- Cascading Style Sheet or CSS
- DOM / Dynamic Display and Interaction
- XML / Data Manipulation
- XML and HTTP to provide Data Retrieval
- and of course, JavaScript as the base foundation to support all of them.
To sum all these up, My definition of AJAX is a web framework that allows you to retrieve data from a website which not requires the webpage to refresh everything. It just pitches to and fro the content that you want without refreshing the other contents.
Not clear enough Dummy? … I’ll deconstruct it more…
Here is an example, you went to a website where it asks you to fill up a form then ask you to hit submit when you are done, in the 90′s web architecture using JavaScript, the server will load the HTML and the JavaScript which holds the commands or codes for the submit button. When you click submit, the data you entered will be sent to the server and when you retrieve the data back, the server will load you the data you wanted and not requiring the entire page including the HTML and its images to load again or refresh, which makes it faster. Now, way back 90′s, the web architecture will require to load both JavaScript and HTML to load everything including the other contents together with the data you want to retrieve. This makes the process slower and using AJAX solves this archaic hassle.
Clear enough? To end this lengthy blog of mine, I want to point out that Django is AJAX based and that should be another reason for you to use and shift to Django framework – faster loading of data and better data retrieval and manipulation.
It’s all about the DATA in Django and thanks to AJAX we can utilize it fully. And also thanks to my expensive coffee I was able to be stay awake and deconstruct AJAX.
