It's Not a Floor Wax
A blend of well-known technologies and a nifty JavaScript tool form the basis of a snappier and more powerful application model for the Web. If you're afraid of acronym overload, don't worrythis one's easy. It's called
Ajax, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.
Ajax is neither a floor wax nor a desert topping (nor, indeed, a lemon-scented cleaning product!). It's a
blend of a number of standard technologies already familiar to developers and designers:
JavaScript, a programming language that adds dynamic scripting to web pages. JavaScript code can be embedded in a web page to allow the page to implement cool new behaviors with a technique called client-side scripting. This technique is almost as old as the Web itself.
XMLHttpRequest, a JavaScript object with an application programming interface (API) that can connect with a server using the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). A lot of the Ajax magic is propelled by this piece of code, which all the major browsers (such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer 6, Safari 1.3 and 2.0, and Opera 7.6) support. The asynchronous part of Ajax derives from this object's characteristics.
Extensible Markup Language (XML), a language designed to define other languages. The XMLHttpRequest object can handle the server response in standard XML format as well as plain text. HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which control what the user sees on a web page. Web developers can use JavaScript to make dynamic changes to the visual interface by programming HTML elements and CSS styles. The Document Object Model (DOM), a model that represents an XML file or web page as a set of related objects that can be dynamically manipulated, even after the user has downloaded the page. The web page view is structured as a tree hierarchy made up of a root node, the parent, and its various branches, or children. Each HTML element is represented by a node or branch, which is accessible via JavaScript. We show a lot (a lot!) of DOM programming in these hacks.
Extensible Stylesheet Language and Transformation (XSLT), a templating technology for transforming the display of XML information for a receiving client.
Ajax is far from new, as these are relatively old technologies. Microsoft issued the first implementation of a JavaScript object that makes HTTP requests, often referred to as the XMLHTTP object, with Version 5.0 of the Internet Explorer browser (as of this writing, IE is on Version 6, with v7 in a beta release).
The plethora of new web applications that use Ajax, however, suggests that this group of technologies has morphed into a new web model. "Web 2.0" is next-generation-speak encompassing Ajax, a form of
Rich Internet Application (so called because much of the application's functionality can reside in the client browser). Examples of these applications are Google Maps, Gmail, a collaboration suite called Zimbra, an interesting personal search-engine tool called Rollyo (http://www.rollyo.com), and one of the first interactive web maps, this one of Switzerland (see http://map.search.ch/index.en.html). The number of Ajax applications is growing very rapidly. You can find a short list on Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_using_Ajax.
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