1) Introduction to Ajax and bAjax
July 19, 2008 – 8:11 am“Greetings! Welcome to bAjax.
I believe you’re being here surely looking for something, maybe Ajax or its framework? Well, if this is what you’re looking for, I hope that you will enjoy with this site.”
A brief of Ajax
Before we delve into bAjax, let’s start a brief of Ajax first. Well, what actually Ajax is:
Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) itself is not a single technology and also, it’s not a new technology as it has been available since 1998. Anyway, it becomes popular and started widely used by many developers after Google, the giant of web applications had tremendously applied this technique in its well-known applications, such as Google Suggest, Google Maps and Gmail.
The ultimate goal of using Ajax is to make the web applications become fast response, more user-friendly and acting as the desktop-like application. It allows users to retrieve data without refreshing or reloading whole web browser.
The technologies behind Ajax are including:
- HTML/XHTML
- CSS
- DOM
- XML
- XSLT
- JavaScript, and
- XMLHttp
All the technologies are available to be used in Ajax solutions. Anyway, there are only three among of them are required for this technology: HTML/XHTML, DOM, and JavaScript. The real thing to make the Ajax lives is: XMLHttpRequest (XHR), which is JavaScript’s object that to make the modern browsers support to communicate with the server without refreshing or reloading the whole browsers.
When talking about Ajax, some of the developers maybe thinking Ajax is only used for the communication at the front-end (client side). The real Ajax is used for handling communication between the client and sever, by sending a small amount of information to and from the server. If Ajax is only used for the front-end communication, then basically it’s nothing special for itself, especially for those who are JavaScript Developer.
Therefore, the prior knowledge of HTML/XHTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript and one of any server-side programming languages (PHP, ASP, etc.) are required for writing Ajax.
So, what is bAjax?
Basically, bAjax is a simple Ajax framework completely written in JavaScript. The purpose of bAjax is to ease and help developers in writing Ajax applications. ‘b’ could stand for ‘basics’, which means the basics of the Ajax (if you wish to define bAjax as ‘Boris Ajax framework’, it’s fine to me. |o|)
Of course, there’re a lot of well-known Ajax frameworks you can use, either client or server-side framework. bAjax is completely in JavaScript, that will be included in the file that you’re going to write your Ajax effects by invoking and reusing the functions.
You may try out these examples to see the effects. If it’s what you want, just feel free proceed to the following posts:)
