We’ve seen a number of technologies evolve in the past 10 years that help make the web user’s experience more dynamic, including JavaScript and Dynamic HTML (DHTML). Is AJAX better than what we had before?

Rating: +0

DHTML is more of a page-description language that includes some dynamic content capabilities. And JavaScript is a browser-supported dynamic scripting language for interacting with the content, navigated using the Document Object Model (DOM) on the client. Not to leave out cascading style sheets (CSS), which define the presentation and are applied or modified using a JavaScript. AJAX, on the other hand, is a set of technologies -- Asynchronous JavaScript and XML -- that work together to deliver a more dynamic user experience. You have JavaScript on the client side to do local processing, maintain state, and send requests. You have standardized XML messaging for the requests and responses. But the main difference of AJAX is the first letter: asynchronous. Rather than requesting a whole page at a time, an AJAX application makes asynchronous requests using XML-enabled browsers to update managed portions of the page. It's this mechanism that makes truly responsive UIs (user interfaces) possible.