What Is Ajax?

This is a new blog.

What is Ajax?

First off, Ajax is a
web technology. Here's
the Wikipedia article:

Ajax (programming)

According to Wikipedia,
Ajax stand for asynchronous
JavaScript and XML.

Right there, we have a mouthful.

I'd say the most important word
is asynchronous. Asynchronous
is one of the most important concepts
in computer science.

The whole World Wide Web is
asynchronous. What is the
advantage of something being
asynchronous? It allows you
to run off and do something else
while you are waiting for something
to happen.

When you talk on the phone to someone,
it is a synchronous communication.
They must pick up the phone or you will
not be able to talk to them.

However, if you leave them a voice mail
message, that is asynchronous.

You are now free to run off and do something
else.

I do not know Ajax. I created this
blog to learn more about it.

However, I can't help but see an immediate
advantage. Namely, you can load your web
page and allow it to be read by your web
visitor while waiting for the web page
to fully implement.

That's my best guess as to one of the key
advantageous of Ajax.

You don't have to wait for absolutely everything
on the web page to become fully functional in
order to have a usable web page.

Again, this is just a guess on my part.

However, it is an educated guess. In many
cases, web pages that are slow to load are
this way because they are waiting for
something on that web page to be fully
functional.

If Ajax solves this problem, I can
see where this would be one of the prime
reasons why it exists.

OK. Back to the Wikipedia article.

Seems that there is support for this
supposition.

Wikipedia says, you can load a web
page without interfering with the
immediate display of that page.

This is not a quote. It is a paraphrase.

However, this seems to be the big idea.

The big idea I'm getting out of this so
far is that page display is not interfered
with or delayed while other aspects of
the web page load.

That's huge!

Ed Abbott