All over the internet I keep hearing about AJAX. So what is it, what can it do and why do we need it. AJAX is a programming language for the web; it uses Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. The purpose is to make websites more responsive. It does this by a small set of JavaScript and off page information to reduce the amount of information loaded on each page which can help your web design a lot. So basically you change one thing on the page as opposed to the whole page itself. By doing this speed, interactivity and usability are all greatly improved.

What AJAX Does according to Wikipedia

The Ajax technique uses a combination of:

While the benefits to the user experience are great, there are some pretty serious drawbacks of AJAX use.

1. Browser Woes- Because pages are dynamic book marking and going back to previous web pages is hard. There are some solutions still in infancy that solve these however. IFRAME can allow you to use the back button correctly as demonstrated in Google Maps. To solve the book marking problem developers use a URL fragment identifier which allows you to bookmark individual states on an AJAX page. Regardless of these improvements these are still not fully solved problems.
2. SEO Conflict – The difficulty of a script built webpage is that search engine crawlers can’t read your site because there is so little, explanatory code to read. This applies to flash and JavaScript as well of course but the problem remains.
3. Load time - There is a problem with network latency and AJAX. Discrepancies between the user request and the server response can create hiccups in a dynamic AJAX web page that will be painfully obvious. There are solutions in the works for this issue.
4. JavaScript – AJAX is dependant on JavaScript which creates many compatibility issues.
5. Analytics – Website Analytics like Google Analytics depend on a new page being loaded and steps being tracked. AJAX changes this process so there will have to new measures to keep your analytics working correctly.


Here is some web design inspiration and a few great AJAX websites to get you started.

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX

http://miniajax.com/

http://www.dhtmlsite.com/

http://www.bestajaxscripts.com/

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/indexb.html

http://www.hotscripts.com/Ajax/index.html

http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/index.html?page=ajax