In case you haven't heard, AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and is a nice architectural tool, a browser-to-application interaction pattern if you will, that makes web-based applications more responsive and therefore more feasibly interactive. For more detail, check out Jesse James Garrett's full description of the technique.
I found this crafty Ajax.NET library that adds AJAX support to ASP.Net apps via simple attribution. The package comes with a single DLL that you reference from your WebApp, as well as a complete usage guide. The author, Michael Schwarz, has a blog and is even lobbying to get AJAX support added to Whidbey, which would be very cool, but not likely at this date.
The implications of Ajax are wide reaching. Most obviously, groovy applications like Google Maps can be made. But many of the standard web controls we're used to could also be made more interactive with the server without requiring traditional page postbacks. And, where one might struggle with whether or not to query a large result set from a web page due to potentially slow information retrieval, Ajax brings the possibility of paging through data and retrieving each chunk via an XML request instead of a postback and page refresh.
Comments