 Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or AJAX, a technique for creating interactive Web applications, has exploded onto the Web development scene, gaining popularity so quickly that some developers are lagging behind in their skills. To address the need for faster AJAX development, lots of companies and developer communities are coming up with Rapid Application Development (RAD) platforms for AJAX. One of those platforms, ThinkCAP JX Framework, combines more than two dozen open source libraries, and the "framework" portion of the application has just been released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). These days, businesses and end-users alike expect fast loading, yet highly interactive and complex Web pages and applications, and software developers are scrambling to keep up with those demands. Web sites that used to be coded strictly in HTML now are inadequate without CSS, JavaScript, DHTML, XML, server-side scripting, or some combination of these techniques. That's what AJAX is, a combination of HTML or XHTML and CSS, JavaScript, and either an XMLHttpRequest or an iFrame object to communicate with the server. AJAX is popular becau it can eliminate the need to completely refresh the page in the browser when requested data is delivered from the remote server, making those server-side applications run fast and smooth, almost like a local application. New information updates smaller blocks of the displayed page without affecting the rest of the page, and server calculations happen in the background, or "asynchronously" while the user is happily interacting with other elements of the page. |
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