STEFANO DEMILIANI

Microsoft embraces AJAX

The news of the day (all the blogs are talking about this today) is that Microsoft has officially embraced the AJAX web technology and they're building a software (code-named Atlas) that will provide web developers with tools to build AJAX-style application in an easy way. All web developers today are so happy...

But, what is AJAX? Is it a revolutionary technology or not? Certainly, I'm not a big expert on this field and I have a question:

AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a term describing a web development technique for creating interactive web applications using a combination of:

• HTML (or XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets for presenting information
• The Document Object Model manipulated through JavaScript to dynamically display and interact with the information presented
• The XMLHttpRequest object to interchange and manipulate data asynchronously with the web server (commonly using XML and XSLT, although AJAX applications can use other technologies, including preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON and JSON-RPC as alternatives to XML/XSLT).

Like DHTML or LAMP, AJAX is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together.

My question is: is AJAX so different from Client-Side Callbacks, a feature that we have in ASP.NET 2.0? Maybe Dino can help me to have an answer, but I think that many features are similar and AJAX is not so revolutionary for what I have understood (but maybe I've something new to learn! ).

Print | posted on Wednesday, June 29, 2005 9:23 PM