Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, while not a technology in itself, is a term coined in 2005 by Jesse James Garrett, that describes a "new" approach to using a number of existing technologies together, including HTML or XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, The Document Object Model, XML, XSLT, and most importantly the XMLHttpRequest object.
When these technologies are combined in the Ajax model, web applications are able to make quick, incremental updates to the user interface without reloading the entire browser page. This makes the application faster and more responsive to user actions.
Although X in Ajax stands for XML, JSON is used more than XML nowadays because of its many advantages such as being lighter and a part of JavaScript. Both JSON and XML are used for packaging information in Ajax model.
Documentation Section
- Getting Started
- This article guides you through the Ajax basics and gives you two simple hands-on examples to get you started.