What is AJAX? And should we worry about it?

Unsurprisingly for the IT industry AJAX is an acronym. What is stands for isn't really that important, what it represents is, I think more important. It covers a set of technologies that have actually been included in browsers for a long time, but it seems that they only really came to attention once someone came up with the AJAX moniker.

The technologies in question give developers the ability from JavaScript to call the web server, retrieve data, and then update the page in place without needing to refresh the whole page to update a small portion of the page. This technique has several advantages, not least amongst them being the fact that it makes for a much nicer user experience. I don't know about you but I've always found web applications that refresh the whole page just to update the options in a drop down list to be very irritating. With AJAX the drop down list can be updated in situ without the need to update the whole page, a much nicer user experience.

It is the user experience which is the very reason why we should worry about AJAX. We all want our users to have a good experience with our web site, after all if they leave your site having had a positive experience then that user is much more likely to come back. Once they've found your site it would be nice to have them come back wouldn't it?

Over the past couple years there have been an increasing number of techniques and capabilities that have been given the AJAX moniker, so that it now covers most of the techniques which update the page insitu, whether calling back to the server or not. Of course, the trick is to use the techniques that are appropriate to the purpose of the page, and not go mad and over do it. But if done well then AJAX can really enhance a site, hopefully in an unobtrusive way, after all the whole point should be to enhance the presentation of the content and not have the content be a slave to the technology being used!