Classic ASP and AJAX

There is a lot of confusion about AJAX and what it is. Mainly, it is a client-side application that sends data to a back end parser, and thus the back-end processor can be written in anything from ASP to JSP, PHP or any other web based language.

First of all, AJAX is a very simple concept. Get it out of your head that it’s complicated......!!!

In the 1990s, most web sites were based on complete HTML pages; each user action required that the page be re-loaded from the server (or a new page loaded). This process is inefficient, as reflected by the user experience: all page content disappears then reappears, etc. Each time a page is reloaded due to a partial change, all of the content must be re-sent instead of only the changed information. This can place additional load on the server and use excessive bandwidth.

Asynchronous loading of content first became practical when Java applets were introduced in the first version of the Java language in 1995. These allow compiled client-side code to load data asynchronously from the web server after a web page is loaded.In 1996, Internet Explorer introduced the iframe element to HTML, which also enabled asynchronous loading. In 1999, Microsoft created the XMLHTTP ActiveX control in Internet Explorer 5, which was later adopted by Mozilla, Safari, Opera and other browsers as the XMLHttpRequest JavaScript object. Microsoft has adopted the native XMLHttpRequest model as of Internet Explorer 7, though the ActiveX version is still supported. The utility of background HTTP requests to the server and asynchronous web technologies remained fairly obscure until it started appearing in full scale online applications such as Outlook Web Access (2000) and Oddpost (2002), and later, Google made a wide deployment of Ajax with Gmail (2004) and Google Maps (2005).

The term Ajax was coined on February 18, 2005 by Jesse James Garrett in an article entitled Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications.

On April 5, 2006 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first draft specification for the XMLHttpRequest object in an attempt to create an official web standard.

Technologies

The following technologies are incorporated in AJAX:

HTML or XHTML and CSS for presentation.
The Document Object Model (DOM) for dynamic display of and interaction with data
XML for the interchange of data, and XSLT for its manipulation
the XMLHttpRequest object for asynchronous communication
JavaScript to bring these technologies together

Before using any technology, it is better to know its advantages and drawbacks. Here are some advantages and drawbacks of Ajax.

Advantages a) Allows feedback, confirmation and errors messages to be displayed on same page/view.

b) Wider variety of controls e.g. sliders, date pickers, windows, tabs, spinners etc.

c) No installation, just an AJAX enabled browser required

d) Higher immunity to viruses and piracy.

e) Reduced load on server resources as processing is distributes over server and client

f) Lowered application development and deployment costs

g) Reduction in network traffic due to more intelligent client and selective data request

Drawbacks


Pages dynamically created using successive Ajax requests do not automatically register themselves with the browser's history engine, so clicking the browser's "back" button may not return the browser to an earlier state of the Ajax-enabled page.


Any user whose browser does not support JavaScript or XMLHttpRequest, or simply has this functionality disabled, will not be able to properly use pages which depend on Ajax. Similarly, devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, and screen readers may not have support for the required technologies.


Ajax-powered interfaces may dramatically increase the number of user-generated requests to web servers and their back-ends (databases, or other). This can lead to longer response times and/or additional hardware needs.


The asynchronous, callback-style of programming required can lead to complex code that is hard to maintain or debug.