Web design is more advanced than it was several ago. There are now different design techniques that can be utilized to create web pages. Ajax is one of the most popular web development techniques, and played an important part in the creation of Google’s Gmail service in 2004.

Ajax is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It’s essentially a group of web design techniques and is used to send some of the processing work to the user’s computer. One of the biggest benefits of using Ajax is that Ajax allows web applications to retrieve data asynchronously from the server, while working in the background. This is effective because there is no interference with the display or behavior of the existing web page.

One important thing to understand about Ajax is that it is not a primary technology in itself. Ajax is a combination of different technologies. The technologies that make up Ajax are:

  • XML
  • HTML
  • XHTML
  • CSS
  • DOM (Document Object Model)
  • XMLHttpRequest
  • JavaScript

Out of these technologies, JavaScript is the most important because it brings the other technologies together. The main benefit of using Ajax is that you’ll have several technologies working together: HTML, XHTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for presentation, DOM (Document Object Model) for interaction with data and dynamic display, XML for the data interchange, XMLHttpRequest for communication asynchronously, and JavaScript for bringing the technologies together.

There are some disadvantages when it comes to using Ajax in web design. For example, web pages created dynamically using several Ajax requests will not automatically be registered with the browser’s history engine. And because of this, if you click the browser’s back button, it won’t necessarily take you back to an earlier version of the page. Also, depending on the Ajax-application, user interactions may be disrupted by dynamic web page updates. This is likely to happen if the user is connected with a weak and unstable connection.

Even with its disadvantages, Ajax is still recommended due to its strengths of eliminating lag between the user’s request and the response. In fact, the primary purpose of Ajax is to enable web applications to function similar to desktop applications. Internet users expect blazing fast responses from web applications, and are quite often frustrated if they have to constantly wait for an application to respond.

Ajax may have its share of detractors, but it is still an emerging field in web design. It is becoming more commonly used on web sites. Users enjoy the immediate response, which is only driving more web masters to use Ajax on their web sites.