Learning jQuery: A Hands-on Guide to Building Rich Interactive Web Front Ends

10. AJAX

Around the year 2005, AJAX revolutionized the Web. Since then, hardly anything is as it used to be on the Web. AJAX hit like a bomb, although it is in fact just a fashion term. Many frameworks for developing applications on the Web occasionally explicitly referred to themselves as AJAX frameworks, although the pure AJAX functionalities often consisted in only a few percent of their performance range. But this small part is immensely important because it forms the basis for modern Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Just think of the many special Google features that are almost all based on AJAX. Of course, a high-end framework such as jQuery also offers all required functions for simplifying the creation of AJAX applications. And these ...