AJAX is in full demand right now. There is a lot of hype surrounding it. Let’s thoroughly discuss why AJAX is here and what its future prospects will be. There may be several aspects on which we can focus our discussion.

AJAX is based on open standards supported by many web browsers and platforms. So there will be any problem of vendor lock-in. Most of the technologies that it uses are already in use for several years. One of the important turnaround came with the release of Mozilla 1.0 on which FireFox is based and its support for the XML HTTP Request Object. This allowed the same asynchronous data transfer that had been possible in Internet Explorer for years. That support and FireFox’s quick adoption really helped people to understand that cross-browser rich Internet applications were possible. The technologies that AJAX includes are JavaScript that has taken a lot of time to be adopted by companies, XML which is a widely used standard from W3C, HTML, Cascading Style Sheets or CSS and XML HTTP Request Object.

The developers and designers have begun to realize that better user-experience plays a vital role in market success. The success of AJAX-based applications such as Google Maps over more traditional alternatives like MapQuest show that the products that offer better user experience will be successful. AJAX is a big contributor in making web applications usable. It eliminates page refresh problems and improves slow response that has affected web applications since their inception. The cause behind this is it allows pages to request small bits of information from the server instead of whole pages. People always want decent user interfaces and are eager to invest in it.

Internet Explorer and Mozilla-based FireFox have acquired a major share in the market and are undoubtedly the easiest browsers to build AJAX web applications. But it is possible to build those rich Internet applications that work on most modern web browsers. AJAX based applications offer more benefits as compared to desktop-based ones. These include a lower cost of deployment, easier support, shorter development times and no installation.

AJAX is based on standards that have been in use for many years. Many developers have more or less exposed to these technologies required to build AJAX applications. So it will not take longer period of time for development teams to shift from HTML and form based applications to rich AJAX style applications. It also means that development teams working on web applications can gradually upgrade their user interfaces to AJAX. It doesn’t necessitate an extensive upgrade and re-write of their web applications. Given the huge investments that have been made in deploying browser-based applications since the late 90s, it’s very interesting to be able to leverage existing systems and improve the user experience.

There is always hot debate going on regarding which is better, AJAX or Flash. Both the technologies have certain advantages and disadvantages in specific situations. But there is a lot of scope for them to work together. Many developers have understood this to implement some really great software using both AJAX and Flash together. It is also absolutely compatible with any standard web server and server-side language such as PHP, ASP, ASP.Net, Perl, JSP, Cold Fusion and many more. This has helped move AJAX further because all web developers can use and talk about a common presentation layer.

Tags: AJAX – Old Technologies, New Tricks