Introducing Ajax

Internet scripting technology has come along at a very brisk pace. While its roots are
lodged in text-based displays (due to very limited amounts of storage space and memory),
over the years it has rapidly evolved into a visual and highly functional medium. As
it grows, so do the tools necessary to maintain, produce, and develop for it. As developers
continue to stretch the boundaries of what they can accomplish with this rapidly advancing
technology, they have begun to request increasingly robust development tools.
Indeed, to satisfy this demand, a great many tools have been created and made available
to the self-proclaimed “web developer.” Languages such as HTML, PHP, ASP, and
JavaScript have arisen to help the developer create and deploy his wares to the Internet.
Each has evolved over the years, leaving today’s web developer with an amazingly powerful
array of tools. However, while these tools grow increasingly powerful every day, several
distinctions truly separate Internet applications from the more rooted desktop applications.
Of the visible distinctions, perhaps the most obvious is the page request. In order to
make something happen in a web application, a call has to be made to the server. In
order to do that, the page must be refreshed to retrieve the updated information from the
server to the client (typically a web browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer). This is
not a browser-specific liability; rather, the HTTP request/response protocol inherent in
all web browsers (see Figure 1-1) is built to function in this manner. While theoretically
this works fine, developers have begun to ask for a more seamless approach so that their
application response times can more closely resemble the desktop application.