Posted on May 29th, 2010Over the past few years, AJAX has seen a dramatic increase in popularity, going from a relatively unknown novelty to a very popular and advanced solution for a lot of website design needs.
The word AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML, and the language’s most powerful and valued property is that is allows webmasters, developers and designers to implement various useful features on their sites that do not require a full page refresh (or any page refresh, for that matter) to work as intended.
For example, before AJAX, uploading multiple photos was a pretty tedious task: you needed to browse to and select an image, click upload, wait for it to finish, and then repeat the procedure for any other images you had. With AJAX, you can select as many pictures as you want and upload them at the same time, while also viewing their status (percentage of upload or completed). This is possible because AJAX constantly maintains the connection between the server and client and does not need to re-initialize it every time it sends or receives a request.
AJAX does its job so well, there are very few reasons you would want to use another language when developing and designing a website. Only in some very specific cases can other languages achieve better performance or stability than AJAX.
Knowing all that, let’s take a look at a few useful things on a website (or other online applications) you can use AJAX for.
Web Forms. AJAX is perfect for any type of online forms, from sign up, contact and feedback forms to long quizzes, surveys and questionnaires. The ability to constantly display updated information is great in this case, as it can be used to provide the user with various information like username availability (I’m sure you’ve seen those sign up forms where the field is highlighted with either red or green right after you type in your desired username; that’s AJAX at work), password strength level or even auto-complete suggestions taken from a large database on the server (like the country, city and street address auto suggestion on Google Maps).
On-page notifications. As I said above, AJAX is perfect for applications where a continuous display of new information is required (without refreshing the page). But username and auto complete suggestions are only the beginning of on-page notifications possibilities of AJAX. You can create much more advanced solutions like a live comments sidebar, where the latest comments are displayed as soon as they’re posted, or Twitter updates, for example, on forums in the user information fields. The possibilities are practically endless, as AJAX can pull any information in real-time from any source.
On-site Instant Messaging. Using AJAX, you can easily implement an on-site, real time instant messaging system, which is very useful when your users constantly communicate with each other. This solution would remove the need for slow Private Messages and contact via a third party IM tool like Skype, especially when both users are on the site. The result would actually increase the time users spend on your site or forum, and therefore, increase the possibility of more income from clicks, views or sales.
Collaborative tools. AJAX can also be used (and is actively being used on many sites) to create great collaborative tools like online whiteboards and collaborative editing tools (for images, text or even video). AJAX can be used to display the same thing to all the participants, and anything anyone writes on the whiteboard (or edits in the text) is instantly seen by the other members. This is an infinitely useful feature for any site or business with members that collaborate on various tasks and projects, and it can be relatively easily created using AJAX (as opposed to other languages).
External widgets and information. This is one of the areas where AJAX is the absolute king. A lot of sites have those various widgets that display the weather, site statistics, time, location, Twitter updates and other information, and almost all of the time; the information is pulled from the various services using AJAX. You can use it to display absolutely any kind of information on your sites, from the widgets mentioned above to audio, podcasts, videos and even full web pages!
There are many more uses for the AJAX programming language (literally hundreds of them!), but the above are what most webmasters and developers encounter in almost every single one of their projects. If you’re still using old HTML or JS techniques to implement the above mentioned features, you seriously have to take a look at AJAX – it will change your thinking about what is possible in web development and design.