Tutorial O’ The Day: Ajax
Last week was a busy one and I didn’t get around to the Tutorial o’ the Day for which I apologize, but it’s back and this week we’re tackling a hot one: Ajax. Ajax is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, coined by Adaptive Path’s Jesse James Garrett (Garret doesn’t capitalize the acronym and I’ve followed his lead since I believe the all-caps version refers to a Colgate registered trademark).
The term Ajax gets bandied about quite a bit, usually in conjunction with that wretch-inducing catch phrase — web 2.0. Depending on who you’re talking to, Ajax can alternately be celebrated as the panacea of the future or, more cynically, the “skip intro” of the 21st century.
To get a good overview of how Ajax works, have a look at Garrett’s article on the subject; it gets fairly technical at times, but if you have some background in web development it shouldn’t be too hard to follow.
In order to help you decide whether Ajax is right for your site, I thought we’d start off with another nice overview tutorial/guide from Eddie Traversa of DHTML Nirvana, entitled, aptly enough, Ajax: What is it Good For?.
Traversa walks you through Ajax’s history and provides a nice synopsis of what Ajax is and how it can be useful.
It also needs to be clear that Ajax isn’t a technology as such but rather is a technique that combines well with other technologies and techniques. For example, xml, dhtml, css, xhtml. In fact, Ajax really is DHTML with the xmlhttprequest object thrown in.
That last sentence is just about the best sound-bite summary of Ajax I’ve ever heard.
The tutorial also walks you through a simple example and provides all the necessary files to get your Ajax experiment up and running.
Photo from Colgate-Palmolive.
