Pro jQuery

C H A P T E R  14

Using Ajax: Part I

Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML but is generally a word in its own right these days. Ajax allows you to make requests to the server asynchronously, meaning, in short, that your request happens in the background and doesn’t prevent the user from interacting with the content in your HTML document. The most common use for Ajax is to submit data from a form element. The advantage of doing this is that the browser doesn’t have to load a new document to display the server’s response, and you can use the standard jQuery functions to display the data within the document seamlessly.

The Ajax support that I’ll be using in this chapter is built into the core jQuery library, although I do briefly describe ...