In a normal request, the browser queries for a whole page. By contrast, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML ) is commonly used to query only small portions of data with a special object called the XMLHttpRequest . That object is used to query data in the background (asynchronous) while the page is still displayed. Depending on the response, parts of the page might be rerendered. In JSF, this is called a partial request .
When the term was first used, the response was some XML data. Nowadays, the most preferred format for the response’s payload is a JSON string, which ...
