Ajax in The Class Room

The recent explosion of Web 2.0 applications has changed user’s expectations regarding the web experience. Users now expect web pages to behave like desktop applications, reacting to mouse movements and individual key strokes and updating only small portions of the page at a time. While a number of technologies exist to create these rich internet applications one the most popular and widely used is AJAX. AJAX isn’t a new technology but uses a number of existing technologies including JavaScript, XML and the XMLHttpRequest object to implement asynchronous browser-server communication and partial page updates. This paper explores some of the benefits of AJAX along with methods for implementing it and why it should be included in our curriculum. The popular computer press has been abuzz with talk of AJAX over the last few years, but should we be concerned about this in the classroom? AJAX isn’t something new, it isn’t a singular new technology but rather a collection of technologies that have been around for some time. The term “AJAX” was coined by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path LLC as a catch phrase Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. The underlying technologies used for AJAX include 1) JavaScript; 2) the XMLHttpRequest object first introduced by Microsoft in Internet Explorer 5 and later incorporated into Mozilla based browsers; 3) XML; 4) the Document Object Model (DOM) and 5) Cascading Style Sheets for standards based presentation (1). While these technologies aren’t new, their use by companies like Google (Google Suggest and Google Maps) and Amazon (A9.com)