Self-tutoring about web programming terms: the tutor mentions AJAX.

I understand AJAX to be an acronym: Asynchronous Javascript and XML. I’m not sure it necessarily involves xml.

The data model behind AJAX is that a user clicks a button on the webpage, then information is retrieved from another resource as a result: finally that information is piped into an element on the webpage. Therefore, some content of the webpage changes to information from another resource. Yet, the surrounding page doesn’t change.

Ideally, the remote resource is encoded in xml format. XML is for organizing information, not displaying it; picking specific information from an xml document is convenient.

I’ve read about what asynchronous means; it’s not a very dramatic part of the AJAX definition. Apparently it just means that the retrieved information appears “whenever it arrives” rather than timed according to some other event(s). It’s compared to “synchronous,” where events must happen in a specific order.

AJAX is a big topic. I’ll be discussing aspects of it in future posts:)

Source:

Ballard, Phil and Michael Moncur. Ajax, Javascript and PHP. Indianapolis: SAMS, 2009.

mendix.com

Jack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane, Campbell River, BC.