Role of AJAX in Web Development

  • Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is defined as a programmatic approach used to develop highly interactive and responsive web applications by exploiting a set of technologies. 
  • This article explains the core principles and workflow of AJAX.

What Is AJAX?

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) develops highly interactive and responsive web applications by exploiting a set of technologies. It allows developers to update individual web page components in real time without reloading the entire webpage.

Before AJAX, whenever a part of webpage content needed to be changed or altered, the process would reload and refresh the whole webpage from the web server. The result of such a method was that it would create large portions of duplicated data in every instance. This problem was resolved with the introduction of AJAX, which allowed web parts to be updated asynchronously without reloading the entire page. This method ensured that updates were displayed almost instantaneously to end users.

AJAX relies on the following technologies to carry out smooth data interchange between a browser and web server:

    • XHTML and CSS: Data presentation
    • HTML Document Object Model (DOM): Enable dynamic user interaction while displaying the updated content
    • XMLHttpRequest object: Move, manipulate, and update data to and from the server
    • XML, HTML, XSLT, and JSON: Manage data exchange with the server
    • JavaScript: Couple data requests with the content display on the user side

The combination of these technologies is crucial in establishing seamless client-server communication without page reloads. As a result, users can interact better with the web application as this method can reload partial updates. Moreover, the technique gives users the power to control their computing environment, much like in traditional desktop applications.

Additionally, while the web server processes the necessary updates on webpages, users can continue to interact with the web application, unlike traditional applications where user interaction is stalled until the HTTP transport to and from the server is complete.

Webpage content can be updated using AJAX in the following scenarios:

    1. User-initiated events: For instance, if a user clicks on a specific button or hovers over a specific text, AJAX can come into
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Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: The Role of Technology

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MR. DENNIS: Hello, and welcome to The Washington Post Live. I’m Brady Dennis, a national environmental and climate reporter here at the Post. Thanks for joining us today for two conversations about the role of technology in curbing the impacts of climate change.

My first guest today is the executive secretary of UN Climate Change, Patricia Espinosa. Secretary Espinosa, thank you for joining us today.

SEC. ESPINOSA: Hello, Dennis. It’s a pleasure to be with you today.

MR. DENNIS: Good to see you.

We saw there in the intro, some clips from the most recent IPCC report, which is a series of scientific findings about the impacts and the science around climate change, and one of the things that the IPCC has told us is that there are technologies that already exist that can help us mitigate the impact of climate change and to slow it from getting worse. Would you talk us maybe through some of what those technologies are, some of what they look like, where we’re seeing them in the real world, and also about the global challenges with implementing them on a broad scale?

SEC. ESPINOSA: Well, thank you for this opportunity to be able to talk about our agenda, the agenda to address climate change, which continues to be the most important and alarming existential threat for humanity, and let me just underline this at the beginning of this conversation.

Also, thank you for touching on the issue of technology which has been actually, in the history of humanity, one of the drivers for change, for changing our way of life, for changing the way that we use resources, sometimes for the good and sometimes not so much for the best of humanity and nature.

I want to say currently we are seeing very exciting and positive developments in the area of technology, and you have presented some of them in your brief video, introductory video. Of course, technologies for renewable sources of energy have really seen an incredible progress. Their costs

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