Ajax Tutorial

Ajax is a catchy name for a type of programming made popular in 2005 by Google and other big web developers. Ajax loosely stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML, but that just sounds like techno jargon to many people.

Ajax - Javascript on Steroids

When javascript was released, people loved all the cool things you could do with the web browser to make a more user-friendly experience. You could do form validation, quirky popup messages, make cool web tools and more. However, Javascript had no way of sending information between the web browser and the web server.

If you wanted to get any information from a database on the server, or send user information to a server-side script like PHP, you had to make an HTML form to GET or POST data to the server. The user would then have to click "Submit", wait for the server to respond, then a new page would load with the results. I'm sure we have all gotten slightly annoyed when having to wait for especially slow websites!

Ajax attempts to remedy this problem by letting your Javascript communicate directly with the server, using a special Javascript object XMLHttpRequest. With this object, your Javascript can get information from the server without having to load a new page!

Ajax - Is That It?

Pretty much. By using the programming practice termed "Ajax" you will be able to trade data, with a web server, without having to load a new page. Instead of Ajax being seen as "The New Way to Develop Websites", it should instead be seen as another weapon to add to your programming arsenal.

This tutorial will introduce you to the basics of Ajax and show you how to send and receive data from a server without using a "Submit" button approach.

Ajax - Recommended Knowledge

Ajax can be quite confusing to someone with little web programming experience. It is highly recommended that you are familiar with html and javascript  before attempting this tutorial.