Alright, I feel like I’ve been slacking off with these posts lately! Whats new? My wife is pregnant, and we purchased some land to build on in the future. Other than that, I have no excuse here!
Anyhow, this post is concerning a wonderful thing called AJAX. What is AJAX? You will find out here!
What is AJAX?
AJAX is a programming language that consists of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. AJAX is preferred if page updates are needed without refreshing the web browser and if you want the application to retrieve information from a database without affecting the speed of your application.
Why use AJAX?
Not only does it increase the speed of your application, but since it doesn’t perform a page refresh, it lowers your overall bandwidth usage on your web site. With AJAX, web developers do not risk losing functionality across a variety of Operating Systems, and browsers.
Disadvantages?
While AJAX is a fantastic language for web developers, there are still some disadvantages. If any user of your site has javascript disabled, then your site will not function properly. This demographic is minimal and this limitation alone should not prevent a web developer from making the jump to AJAX.
The most dis-advantageous aspect of AJAX would be Google’s inability to index an AJAX based site. This severely affects your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and page ranking. It is reasonable to suspect that Google will develop a method to index these sites, but as of today, it is still a problem.
Conclusion
If not used in excess, AJAX is a fantastic solution to bandwidth laden sites and XML functionality. Make this jump, you will not regret it.
Great tip. congrats on the baby