AJAX Scripting & Me

Google has been playing around with it for some time, and so has many Web 2.0 sites, and I thought this AJAX is going to take two or three months to learn! - But guess what? I've done it in one night - Single Stretch!!

AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript & XML) is nothing but good ol' Javascript, with a single object added - the XMLHttpRequest object, which has an open() function, with an argument to specify whether to access data from the server synchronously or aysnchronously - simple!

Learn how this object can be used to fetch data, (and a little bit of Javascript & HTML, ofcourse!) and you call yourself an AJAX Programmer! (Well, atleast a beginner in AJAX..)

It has amazed me how fast Gmail's mailbox works, loading so fast - ever since I heard that AJAX is what powers Gmail (Not sure that's all that's behind Gmail, but that's what I've heard!), I've wanted to learn this truly promising technique.. And it seems, I've started using it already!

Last night I finally decided to have a go at this. Tried w3schools, but then started Googling for resources and got to DHTML Nirvana and started up my Asynchronous Scripting love affair.. Within an hour or so, I was redisigning my personal website's articles using AJAX. Now its complete, and I'd like you to have a look at the article section on atheism (I have even added a loading animation! - never knew how to do that, but its working now..)

Pages load much faster, thanks to asychronous downloading from the server - instead of reloading the whole page, only the content area is refreshed..