Ajax
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-07-03 06:33:08 - Graham EllisWe thrive on taking note of upcoming technologies - newly opening niches. Sometimes, as with Perl some 10 years ago and with PHP more recently, it becomes a "no-brainer" that we should be getting more heavily involved and - if we like the technology - offering related services and courses. But for the majority of new developments, the case is less clear cut and often we'll do no more than learn to the "overview" level.
Can I place the first time I heard of Perl or PHP? Not exactly, but I can tell you that it was only after a very few mentions indeed that I looked them up. And so I sit here this morning looking up AJAX.
Ajax - Asyncronous JavaScript and XML. In other words, running a web application as a client side Javascript program which accesses data it needs on a server using XML. So Ajax isn't a language or technology in itself - rather it's a bundle of technologies that come together to provide an approach to web appllications. There's a good paper on it at Adaptive Path that will tell you more if you're interested.
One for us? Not really at the moment. Although I might even concede that client side is the best approach for some applications, for many others (perhaps even for most applications), server side has so much going for it. But you never know - I could foresee some of the more dynamic map navigation work that we've been doing of late benefiting from being more client side, and our framed file selector demo that's pure PHP at present could have a much cleaner user interface at the expense of adding yet more technologies in. Perhaps we'll be seeing bubbles of Ajax cropping up for some of the more interactive selection elements of our LAMP applications in the future.
Update - September 2008 - I have added a simple Ajax Example here, and Ajax is now covered on our PHP Techniques Workshop