MicroNugget: What is AJAX?

In this video, Garth Schulte covers AJAX. AJAX can do a lot for you and your webpages. Using it can lead to sped up requests, increased responsiveness, enhanced interactivity, and even decreased load times.

The name, AJAX, might bring to mind the industrial-strength cleaning agent, but the technology has nothing to do with scrubbing. It's actually been around for awhile, but only really taken off in recent years.

“Asynchronous Javascript and XML” — or AJAX — is more of a technique than it is a technology.

It does its job by sitting on top of Javascript or JQuery and uses XML/HTTP requests (with which background requests can be sent to the server), and allows for portions of a webpage to get updated.

That’s a significant change from the past. Back then, if data needed to be changed or data needed to be retrieved from the server, the entire page had to be re-requested.

It didn’t matter if the request was small or large, changes to the underlying content needed a page refresh that passed through the server.

With AJAX, that data can be requested in the background, and when the response comes back to the frontend, updated HMTL can be injected into the DOM, and only that portion of the page needs to be updated.

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Happy Tuesday Nugget Fans! Check out Garth's latest MicroNugget discussing AJAX:

[ssmantri]

That was a very nice & good video, , , I ajaculated !