How Ajax Has Become More Standardized
If you are familiar with Gmail, Google Suggest, or Flickr, you will have had a glimpse of the world that Ajax promises to create. These web applications are the result of a new trend in emerging Internet technologies. You will probably notice that many of these applications are very similar to the desktop applications that you’ve used for years.
There is little need for them to rely on things like plug-ins or features that are commonly associated with browsers. In the past, most web applications were nothing more than a group of HTML pages that had to be reloaded if the user wished to change any part of the page content. The introduction of things such as CSS and JavaScript have dramatically changed this.
Many developers believe that Ajax will allow web applications to behave like their desktop counterparts, and this will make the web highly interactive. Perhaps the biggest challenge that developers will face is getting these applications to become more standardized. There are a number of methods you can use personally to allow your web applications to behave more like desktop applications. Ajax has played an important role in the development of these tools. Because it uses JavaScript technology, a single HTML page can contact a server and get information that can be altered in the form of XML documents.
Once this has been done, the JavaScript unit may use the content to update the Document Object Model. It should be noted that while the term "Ajax" is relatively new, the concept is not. The techniques for this process were made available to Internet Explorer developers nearly a decade ago. Many developers today are using a wide variety of Java applets and plug-ins to essentially achieve the same effect. The thing that has changed is support for the XMLHttpRequest object. Many of the browsers support it today, and this had made it easier for robust web applications to become more prevalent on the web.
I would even go as far as to say that the XMLHttpRequest object will be responsible for Ajax becoming more standardized on the web. One of the things that makes Ajax clients so distinct is the fact that JavaScript has been placed within the page control logic. In the past, server side applications have placed a great emphasis creating HTML documents based on all the client events that resulted in a call being made to the server. A client would have to refresh the entire page for every response. Web applications which are rich must place an emphasis using XML data for various processes and tasks.
There are a number of important factors that can allow Ajax to become more standardized. The first of these is real time data validation of forms. Some of these forms could include things such as postal codes or serial numbers. They can be used to validate a form before it is submitted by a user. Another element that plays an important role in Ajax is autocompletion. Autocompletion deals with the portion of data that involves things such as an email address or name of a city. By using additional factors such as load on demand, an HTML page can gather more data from the background, and this will allow the browser to load pages much faster than it would with traditional mechanisms.
Once Ajax is fully introduced, users will have access to controls that are much more advanced. They will be able to work with things such as menus, data tables, progress bars, and text editors. With these tools, the user will not be required to reload the page every time a change is made. HTML pages may also have the responsibility of taking polls for data.
However, it should be noted that taking polls is not exceptionally efficient when it comes to making sure the data on the page is current. Some of the technologies which may be useful in this area are those such as Comet. They can create an efficient connection between both clients and servers.
As you see, it is easy to see why Ajax has so much potential. While there are a number of challenges that developers must deal with, it is very likely that Ajax will play a fundamental role in the transformation of the web as we know it today.
