Ajax and Wikipedia
Every day, we’re seeing new and innovative uses for Ajax on the web. Ajax, for the uninitiated, is a web programming framework that presents information from a database to the browser in an asynchronous fashion. It uses XHTML and CSS to present the information, JavaScript to interact with the browser, and the XMLHttpRequest object to pull the data from a database.
In a normal, old fashioned database call, the user types something into a form and hits enter, the browser chugs for a moment, then the page gets refreshed with the data the user requested. In an Ajax call, only a portion of the page gets refreshed (via JavaScript), sometimes with no further action by the user. Requests are faster and can be integrated seamlessly with the user experience.
Case in point: the LuMriX Wikipedia search. The front end of the page is tied to the open source Wikipedia database, and your searches start being performed as soon as you start typing. Each character you enter into the search field is added to your search criteria and a list of suggested search topics is dynamically updated. Try it out.
This is an application of Ajax that looks super fancy, but is actually rather mind-blowing in its simplicity. Wikipedia’s popularity of late has somewhat crippled the speed of its search, so this tool makes lightning-fast searches of the Wikipedia possible again. And, if you’re wondering how they manage to get data from the Wikipedia database so quickly while the main Wikipedia site remains so slow, that’s an easy one. Wikipedia maintains regular dumps of its entire database that anyone can grab and use in their own XML or SQL web applications.
For more on Ajax, and for some more examples of its uses, check out Paul Adams’ articles about XMLHttpRequest and Ajax and RUBY right here on Webmonkey.
Also, tune in next week when Paul gives us a lesson in using TRAX, a PHP version of RUBY that uses similar elements.
