Improving Interaction with Ajax

Abstract

Ajax represents a fundamental shift in what the Web is capable of and is one of the defining characteristics of the Web 2.0 movement. First coined by Jesse James Garrett in his 2005 essay “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications” (http://adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000385.php), Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. By enabling web applications to make requests to the server behind the scenes without refreshing the browser, Ajax can dramatically improve the responsiveness and usability of the user interface. It enables live searching, in-place editing, autocompletion, drag-and-drop reordering, and a host of interface techniques that were previously only available to desktop applications. Although the acronym may be relatively recent, Ajax isn’t exactly new. In fact, it has been around for several years. The problem was that it was prohibitively difficult to implement successfully. Times have changed, though; and with modern web frameworks like Rails, Ajax is accessible to the masses.