Technologies behind AJAX

AJAX itself is an umbrella term that stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, but it’s a combination of web based technologies that make up the AJAX.

These are:

HTML/XHTML: That creates the presentation layer for web applications in ASP.Net.

JavaScript: That is used to generate AJAX scripts and many other Dynamic HTML functions.

CSS: It provides layout and formatting of web pages created using HTML/XHTML.

DOM: Document Object Model that helps in generating Dynamic object on web pages.

XML: Extensible markup language that works as data transfer exchange in the format of XML.

XSLT: Extensible style language transformation. It transforms the XML data into XHTML format web page using CSS formatting.

XMLHttp/XMLHttpRequest: These ActiveX models work behind to perform the AJAX communication between web pages and back-end server without sending the full page postback data. This AJAX methodology reduces the server traffic load and various actions to be performed each time the page data is posted to the server and send it back to the client.

Who is using AJAX Technology?

From the second half of year 2005 AJAX has become popular among the web developers and now there are number of major internet giant companies using AJAX technology. So, who is using AJAX?

The main contributor of internet is Google these days which is using AJAX in almost each Google applications online. Following are some of the Google’s Online Projects based on AJAX:

• Google Mail (GMAIL): It provides the online Google web mail service to send or receive e-mails.
  
  
• Google Maps: You can view the different views of world on Google maps. You can also zoom in and zoom out the locations that Google map displays.
  
  
• Google AJAX search (Google suggest): It provides the drop-down control service that displays the estimated count of number of results in a drop-down for the keyword being typed in the search box even before clicking the search button.

Second to Google, Microsoft is also using AJAX.

• Microsoft Hotmail: Web mail service of Microsoft
  
  
• Live.com: Search engine of Microsoft

Yahoo is another one in race that also uses AJAX in web projects:

Yahoo Mail Beta: Yahoo web mail service