Ajax (programming)

"AJAX" redirects here. For other uses, see Ajax.

Ajax (also AJAX; /ˈeɪdʒæks/; an acronym for asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a group of interrelated web development techniques used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications. With Ajax, web applications can send data to, and retrieve data from, a server asynchronously (in the background) without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. Data can be retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object. Despite the name, the use of XML is not required (JSON is often used instead), and the requests do not need to be asynchronous.

Ajax is not a single technology, but a group of technologies. HTML and CSS can be used in combination to mark up and style information. The DOM is accessed with JavaScript to dynamically display, and allow the user to interact with, the information presented. JavaScript and the XMLHttpRequest object provide a method for exchanging data asynchronously between browser and server to avoid full page reloads.

History

In the 1990s, most web sites were based on complete HTML pages. Each user action required that the page be reloaded from the server (or a new page loaded). This process was inefficient, as reflected by the user experience: all page content disappeared then reappeared. Each time a page was reloaded due to a partial change, all of the content had to be re-sent, even though only some of the information had changed. This placed additional load on the server and used excessive bandwidth. In 1996, the iframe tag was introduced by Internet Explorer to load content asynchronously.

In 1998, Microsoft Outlook Web Access team implemented the first component XMLHTTP by client script.

In 1999, Microsoft utilized its iframe technology to dynamically update the news stories and stock quotes on the default page for Internet Explorer, and created the XMLHTTP ActiveX control in Internet Explorer 5, which was later adopted by Mozilla, Safari, Opera and other browsers as the XMLHttpRequest JavaScript object. Microsoft has adopted the native XMLHttpRequest model as of Internet Explorer 7, though the ActiveX version is still supported. The utility of background HTTP requests to the server and asynchronous web technologies remained fairly obscure until it started appearing in full scale online applications such as Outlook Web Access (2000) and Oddpost (2002).

Google made a wide deployment of standards-compliant, cross browser Ajax with Gmail (2004) and Google Maps (2005).

The term Ajax was coined on 18 February 2005 by Jesse James Garrett in an article entitled "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications", based on techniques used on Google pages.

On 5 April 2006, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first draft specification for the XMLHttpRequest object in an attempt to create an official web standard.

Technologies

The term Ajax has come to represent a broad group of web technologies that can be used to implement a web application that communicates with a server in the background, without interfering with the current state of the page. In the article that coined the term Ajax, Jesse James Garrett explained that the following technologies are incorporated:

• HTML (or XHTML) and CSS for presentation
• The Document Object Model (DOM) for dynamic display of and interaction with data
• XML for the interchange of data, and XSLT for its manipulation
• The XMLHttpRequest object for asynchronous communication
• JavaScript to bring these technologies together

Since then however there have been a number of developments in the technologies used in an Ajax application, and the definition of the term Ajax. XML is not required for data interchange and therefore XSLT is not required for the manipulation of data. JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is often used as an alternative format for data interchange, although other formats such as preformatted HTML or plain text can also be used.

Asynchronous HTML and HTTP (AHAH) involves using XMLHTTPRequest to retrieve (X)HTML fragments which are then inserted directly into the web page.

Drawbacks

• In pre-HTML5 browsers, pages dynamically created using successive Ajax requests did not automatically register themselves with the browser's history engine, so clicking the browser's "back" button may not have returned the browser to an earlier state of the Ajax-enabled page, but may have instead returned to the last full page visited before it. Such behavior — navigating between pages instead of navigating between page states — may be desirable, but if fine-grained tracking of page state is required then a pre-HTML5 workaround was to use invisible iframes to trigger changes in the browser's history. A workaround implemented by Ajax techniques is to change the URL fragment identifier (the part of a URL after the '#') when an Ajax-enabled page is accessed and monitor it for changes. HTML5 provides an extensive API standard for working with the browser's history engine.
• Dynamic web page updates also make it difficult to bookmark and return to a particular state of the application. Solutions to this problem exist, many of which again use the URL fragment identifier. The solution provided by HTML5 for the above problem also applies for this.
• Depending on the nature of the Ajax application, dynamic page updates may interfere disruptively with user interactions, especially if working on an unstable Internet connection. For instance, editing a search field may trigger a query to the server for search completions, but the user may not know that a search completion popup is forthcoming, and if the internet connection is slow, the popup list may show up at an inconvenient time, when the user has already proceeded to do something else.
• Because most web crawlers do not execute JavaScript code, publicly indexable web applications should provide an alternative means of accessing the content that would normally be retrieved with Ajax, thereby allowing search engines to index it.
• Any user whose browser does not support JavaScript or XMLHttpRequest, or simply has this functionality disabled, will not be able to properly use pages which depend on Ajax. Devices such as smartphones and PDAs may not have support for the required technologies, though this is becoming less of an issue. The only way to let the user carry out functionality is to fall back to non-JavaScript methods. This can be achieved by making sure links and forms can be resolved properly and not relying solely on Ajax.
• Similarly, some web applications which use Ajax are built in a way that cannot be read by screen-reading technologies, such as JAWS. The WAI-ARIA standards provide a way to provide hints in such a case.
• Screen readers that are able to use Ajax may still not be able to properly read the dynamically generated content.
• The same origin policy prevents some Ajax techniques from being used across domains, although the W3C has a draft of the XMLHttpRequest object that would enable this functionality. Methods exist to sidestep this security feature by using a special Cross Domain Communications channel embedded as an iframe within a page, or by the use of JSONP.
• The asynchronous callback-style of programming required can lead to complex code that is hard to maintain, to debug and to test.

Example

Here is an example of a simple Ajax request using the GET method.

get-ajax-data.js:

// This is the client side
// Initialize the Ajax request
var xhr = XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open('get', 'send-ajax-data.php', false);
// Send the request to send-ajax-data.php
xhr.send(null);
var response = xhr.responseText;
alert(response); // 'This is the returned text.'

send-ajax-data.php:

<?php
// This is the server-side script
// Set the content type
header('Content-Type: text/plain');
// Send the data back
echo "This is the returned text.";
?>

jQuery example

$.get('ajax/test.html', function(data) {
    $('.result').html(data);
    alert('Load was performed.');
});

See also

• Ajax framework
• List of Ajax frameworks
• AJAX Service Bus
• Comet (programming) (also known as Reverse Ajax)
• Rich Internet application
• WebSocket
• XMLHttpRequest
• ActionScript
• AJAJ

External links

• Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications—Article that coined the term and Q&A
• Ajax (programming) at the Open Directory Project
• Ajax Tutorial with GET, POST, text and XML examples.