Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 12-4.
Ah, my results—now I can listen to the flash video I've been searching for
Prior to Google rolling out these asynchronous calls on the search page, one entered an
entire query into the search box, pressed “Search,” and waited for the screen to reload.
If there was an error in the query, the user didn't know until the new page loaded and
Google pointed it out. This took up the user's time (by loading pages needlessly) and
Google's bandwidth. Recently, Google has taken this “helping hand” a step further by
running the entire search asynchronously—you can type your query and, letter by letter,
the search results update within the same browser window.
So What About the JavaScript and XML?
AJAX, technically, can work with any client-side programming language (client-side
languages, like JavaScript, process within the user's browser. Server-side languages,
like PHP, process on the web server). However, JavaScript is predominantly used as it's
become the lingua franca of client-side languages. XML gets in on the game because
it's become a simple and easy-to-understand way to move data around. While you
could mix other technologies into the AJAX banquet, we'll stick with JavaScript and XML
in our examples here.
Now that we've established what AJAX is, let's talk about some neat ways we can
incorporate it into some very simple applications. We'll start with a word-of-the-day
