Ajax (programming)

Ajax (also AJAX; /ˈeɪdʒæks/; short for asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a set of web development techniques using many web technologies on the client-side to create asynchronous Web applications. With Ajax, web applications can send data to and retrieve from a server asynchronously (in the background) without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. By decoupling the data interchange layer from the presentation layer, Ajax allows for web pages, and by extension web applications, to change content dynamically without the need to reload the entire page. In practice, modern implementations commonly substitute JSON for XML due to the advantages of being native to JavaScript.

Ajax is not a technology, but a group of technologies. HTML and CSS can be used in combination to mark up and style information. The DOM is accessed with JavaScript to dynamically display – and allow the user to interact with – the information presented. JavaScript and the XMLHttpRequest object provide a method for exchanging data asynchronously between browser and server to avoid full page reloads.

In the early-to-mid 1990s, most Web sites were based on complete HTML pages. Each user action required that a complete page be loaded from the server. This process was inefficient, as reflected by the user experience: all page content disappeared, then reappeared. Each time the browser reloaded a page because of a partial change, all of the content had to be re-sent, even though only some of the information had changed. This placed additional load on the server and made bandwidth the limiting factor on performance.

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