Ajax?

Could anyone tell me what ajax is about and show me a good example?

Regards
Mikael

Ajax actually falls under javascript and google is your friend.

Do you have any example of pages based on ajax?

There are plenty on the web. Have a google.

Or just go to Google...

Let's see... Gmail, Personalize Homepage, the new Calendars, Google Maps....

Damn, cool this i will have to learn

So do anyone have any link to tutorials where i can learn to move object? like in http://www.google.com/ig

That's just javascript, not ajax.

It stores the configuration in a cookie too.

Hmm, so what can i do with ajax that i can't with javascript?

Okay, let me explain what ajax is

you have a javascript on your page. then you click a link with a url like "javascript:query('blah');"

That calls your function 'query' which uses ajax. what ajax does here is make a connection to a specified page, and returns the result to your script. you can then use that result, for example, to modify the content on the page apropriately via script.

The special thing is that instead of loading a whole new page, the work is done in the background and you can still view the page.

AJAX is primarily about making HTTP requests from inside the webpage without having the entire webpage refresh. This way you can send smaller amounts of information back and forth and have webpages dynamically change.

Before AJAX, people would use hidden frames to send background HTTP requests. I think Gmail may do this b/c it uses a hidden frame. With AJAX, instead of just refreshing the entire hidden frame, you can use the hidden frame as a large session scratch pad since you can store a lot more information there than in a cookie.

You can do AJAX by calling XMLHttpRequest yourself or by using an AJAX JS library. Some popular libraries include:

• Dojo Toolkit
• Mochikit
• Prototype

I've used Prototype which is nice but I'm looking into moving to Dojo because it has built-in JSON support (nicer than hacking it on to Prototype). Prototype drops the response into a specified element's innerHTML which is quick and dirty but designed to update just one client object so you may end up with more AJAX requests than you need/want. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation and lets you send multiple data items to the client in a format JavaScript understands.

Yahoo! Mail beta also an interesting application of AJAX. It's like using MS Outlook in a web browser. Instead of clicking through pages of mail (like Gmail) you scroll through the entire list, kind of like how Google Maps lets you scroll around a map.

Mochikit also features JSON support

It does. Do you know what the main differences between Dojo and Mochikit are? For some reason, Dojo seems to have more mindshare among the developers I'm around.