Ajax (programming)

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

Ajax (also AJAX; /ˈæks/; short for asynchronous JavaScript and XML)[1][2][3] is a set of web development techniques using many web technologies on the client-side to create asynchronous Web applications. With Ajax, web applications can send data to and retrieve from a server asynchronously (in the background) without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. By decoupling the data interchange layer from the presentation layer, Ajax allows for web pages, and by extension web applications, to change content dynamically without the need to reload the entire page.[4] In practice, modern implementations commonly substitute JSON for XML due to the advantages of being native to JavaScript.[5]

Ajax is not a 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 early-to-mid 1990s, most Web sites were based on complete HTML pages. Each user action required that a complete page be loaded from the server. This process was inefficient, as reflected by the user experience: all page content disappeared, then reappeared. Each time the browser reloaded a page because of 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 made bandwidth the limiting factor on performance.

In 1996, the iframe tag was introduced by Internet Explorer to load or to fetch content asynchronously.

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

In 1999, Microsoft used its iframe technology to dynamically update the news stories and stock quotes on the default page for Internet Explorer,[6] 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.[7] Microsoft has adopted the native XMLHttpRequest model as of Internet Explorer 7. The ActiveX version is still supported in Internet Explorer, but not in Microsoft Edge. 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 App (2000)[8] and Oddpost (2002).

Google made a wide deployment of standards-compliant, cross browser Ajax with Gmail (2004) and Google Maps (2005).[9] In October 2004 Kayak.com's public beta release was among the first large-scale e-commerce uses of what their developers at that time called "the xml http thing".[10]

The term "Ajax" was publicly stated on 18 February 2005 by Jesse James Garrett in an article titled "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications", based on techniques used on Google pages.[3]

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.[11][12] The latest draft of the XMLHttpRequest object was published on 30 January 2014.[13]

Technologies

The conventional model for a Web Application versus an application using Ajax

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,[3][4] Jesse James Garrett explained that the following technologies are incorporated:

Since then, however, there have been a number of developments in the technologies used in an Ajax application, and in the definition of the term Ajax itself. XML is no longer required for data interchange and, therefore, XSLT is no longer required for the manipulation of data. JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is often used as an alternative format for data interchange,[14] although other formats such as preformatted HTML or plain text can also be used.[15]

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

Drawbacks

Examples


JavaScript example

An example of a simple Ajax request using the GET method, written in JavaScript.

get-ajax-data.js:

// This is the client-side script.

// Initialize the HTTP request.
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open('get', 'send-ajax-data.php');

// Track the state changes of the request.
xhr.onreadystatechange = function () {
    var DONE = 4; // readyState 4 means the request is done.
    var OK = 200; // status 200 is a successful return.
    if (xhr.readyState === DONE) {
        if (xhr.status === OK) {
            alert(xhr.responseText); // 'This is the returned text.'
        } else {
            alert('Error: ' + xhr.status); // An error occurred during the request.
        }
    }
};

// Send the request to send-ajax-data.php
xhr.send(null);

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

The same example as above written in the popular JavaScript library jQuery.

$.get('send-ajax-data.php')
    .done(function(data) {
        alert(data);
    })
    .fail(function(data) {
        alert('Error: ' + data);
    });

See also

References

  1. http://shiflett.org/blog/2007/apr/ajax-is-not-an-acronym
  2. https://blogs.oracle.com/arungupta/entry/ajax_vs_ajax_ajax_ofcourse
  3. 1 2 3 Jesse James Garrett (18 February 2005). "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications". AdaptivePath.com. Archived from the original on 2 July 2008. Retrieved 19 June 2008.
  4. 1 2 Ullman, Chris (March 2007). Beginning Ajax. wrox. ISBN 978-0-470-10675-4. Archived from the original on 5 July 2008. Retrieved 24 June 2008.
  5. http://www.json.org/xml.html
  6. MSN.com. Home.microsoft.com (1999-12-31). Retrieved on 2013-07-13.
  7. "Dynamic HTML and XML: The XMLHttpRequest Object". Apple Inc. Retrieved 25 June 2008.
  8. Hopmann, Alex. "Story of XMLHTTP". Alex Hopmann’s Blog. Retrieved 17 May 2010.
  9. "A Brief History of Ajax". Aaron Swartz. 22 December 2005. Retrieved 4 August 2009.
  10. English, Paul. "Kayak User Interface". OFFICIAL KAYAK.COM TECHNOBLOG. Retrieved 22 May 2014.
  11. 1 2 "The XMLHttpRequest Object". World Wide Web Consortium. 5 April 2006. Archived from the original on 16 May 2008. Retrieved 25 June 2008.
  12. van Kesteren, Anne; Jackson, Dean. "The XMLHttpRequest Object". W3.org. W3C. Retrieved 2015-11-14.
  13. Kesteren, Anne; Aubourg, Julian; Song, Jungkee; Steen, Hallvord R. M. "XMLHttpRequest Level 1". W3.org. W3C. Retrieved 2015-11-14.
  14. "JavaScript Object Notation". Apache.org. Archived from the original on 16 June 2008. Retrieved 4 July 2008.
  15. "Speed Up Your Ajax-based Apps with JSON". DevX.com. Archived from the original on 4 July 2008. Retrieved 4 July 2008.
  16. Quinsey, Peter. "User-proofing Ajax".
  17. "WAI-ARIA Overview". W3C. Archived from the original on 26 October 2010. Retrieved 21 October 2010.
  18. Edwards, James (5 May 2006). "Ajax and Screenreaders: When Can it Work?". sitepoint.com. Retrieved 27 June 2008.
  19. "Access Control for Cross-Site Requests". World Wide Web Consortium. Archived from the original on 14 May 2008. Retrieved 27 June 2008.
  20. "Secure Cross-Domain Communication in the Browser". The Architecture Journal (MSDN). Archived from the original on 29 March 2010. Retrieved 27 April 2010.
  21. Cuthbertson, Tim. "What is asynchronous programming, and why is it so damn awkward?". GFX Monk. Retrieved 19 October 2010.
  22. "Selenium documentation: Fetching a Page". Selenium. Retrieved 6 October 2011.
    It is worth noting that if your page uses a lot of Ajax on load then WebDriver may not know when it has completely loaded. If you need to ensure such pages are fully loaded, then you can use Explicit and Implicit Waits.
  23. Pimentel, Victoria; Nickerson, Bradford G. (2012-05-08). "Communicating and Displaying Real-Time Data with WebSocket". Internet Computing, IEEE. 16 (4): 45–53. doi:10.1109/MIC.2012.64.
  24. 1 2 "Why use Ajax?". InterAKT. 10 November 2005. Archived from the original on 29 May 2008. Retrieved 26 June 2008.
  25. 1 2 "Deep Linking for AJAX".
  26. 1 2 "HTML5 specification". Retrieved 21 October 2011.
  27. Hendriks, Erik (23 May 2014). "Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index". Google. Retrieved 24 May 2015.
  28. Prokoph, Andreas (8 May 2007). "Help Web crawlers efficiently crawl your portal sites and Web sites". IBM. Retrieved 22 April 2009.
  29. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawling-scheme.html

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to AJAX (programming).
Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: AJAX
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