Comments on Faisal's Interactions: Simple AJAX Tutorial

thanks ... that does make it clearer

2006-12-08T21:44:00.000+02:00

thanks ... that does make it clearer

AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. I...

2006-12-08T19:36:00.000+02:00

AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. It is a new technique in programming that utilizes already available technologies to enhance the web applications interactivity.

Ok, now in english words.
AJAX is a way to make web applications more user friendly, because web applications always suffered from being far slower than desktop applications and less interactive.
For instance, imagine a web interface where you need to register for an email account. You choose your username, fill some data in, and click submit, only to be redirected to the same page telling you that the username is already in use.
If you were using AJAX, when the user enters the desired username, they can continue to fill the form, while username availability check would be run in the background asyncrhonously. This greatly enhances the user experience, since they don't need to keep reloading the page to find out the latest information available.
Another use is for interactive menus. Imagine a site that shows you two menus, where one contains the name of countries, and the second shows you the names of cities within the country you choose in the first menu. This was done either reloading the entire page once you chose a country, or by loading all possible countries and cities when the page first loads and then using javascript to display the appropriate informaiton.
With AJAX you no longer need to use either of those extremely slow techniques. When the user selects a country, an asynchronous request is sent behind the scenes to fill the second menu with appropriate values.

Hope i made it a bit clearer.

I heard the term AJAX before. I used some hints I ...

2006-12-08T06:46:00.000+02:00

I heard the term AJAX before. I used some hints I found on http://hoctro.blogspot.com/ to tweak my blog page. I don't really understand what AJAX really does. I'm glad you're going to be posting stuff about coding. I have a very basic idea in programming. I'm glad you're doing some coding help here for novice users like me.

peace

Thanx for the clarification. That point of advice ...

2006-12-07T10:42:00.000+02:00

Thanx for the clarification. That point of advice is available on the second link of the resources i used to write that article. But i thought such things should be left out at the moment. This is not a full AJAX tutorial, just a point to start at.

hey man! nice post, but the only limit is not your...

2006-12-07T10:29:00.000+02:00

hey man!
nice post, but the only limit is not your imaginations ;) ..
please notice that XMLHttpRequest has a basic security restriction prevents you from making XMLHttpRequests to any server except the server where your web page came from. To access third party web services, XMLHttpRequest needs to be fixed and those fixes are outlined as:
-Creating Application Proxies
-Using Apache Proxy
-Script tag hack with application proxy.

thank you for the extraordinary post mano :)