Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications

Ajax is a new approach to the web applications. In tradtional web environment , the working of the web is a something like this : Whenever you do something the browser sends a HTTP request to the web server , then the server processes the information and sends the data back to the client .
Ajax stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML . This is a novel new approach to the web applications. It is one of the hot topics now. Here there is an intermediate engine called as AJAX engine which sits in the browser of the client and processes all the requests and sends them to the server . The Ajax engine is a little bit intelligent , ie it does some basic processing on its own and does not entirely depend on the server.
A very good example for this is the Gmail. If you are familiar with the working of Gmail , you would be able to appreciate this. This is how the Gmail works : whenever the user logs into the mail account , the browser downloads a very pretty big Javascript of about 250 KB ( this is why it takes some time for the initial loading) . And then on , it keeps flying .. Yes now the Javascript which was downloaded does all the processing like proving the UI , validations and other details.. It just downloads the necessary information like (mail , contacts from the server ) .. So the overall performance is increased .
Now this approach is being follwed by google for many of its applications . The Google maps is a classic example for this .. There are other such wonderful sites like meebo ( a web-based IM client ) ..
The future for this AJAX technology is vast and yet to be explored ..

For further references :

http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX

Have a look at these wonderful creations which use AJAX :

www.meebo.com
http://maps.google.com/
Google Suggest