The Book of JavaScript, 2nd Edition

Introduction to Ajax

The term Ajax was coined by Jesse James Garrett^[1] to describe a general approach to creating web applications. This approach involves the following steps:

1. An event, such as a user moving the mouse or typing into an input field, triggers one or more simultaneous requests to a webserver for more information.

2. While the webserver is processing the requests, the web browser goes about its business as usual, allowing the user to continue interacting with the web page.

3. The result from each request appears once the webserver has processed that request, and it is used to update the web page using the DHTML techniques you learned in Chapter 13.

Figure 14-3 shows how Ajax works and how it differs from the traditional style of communication ...