since some of our fellow residence here have asked me “what the hell is ajax all about ? “, i think i should share some of my early discovery in ajax with all of you. Btw, im not an ajax guru, therefore i would try to explain it in layman terms.

So what is ajax?

ajax in plain word is a technology that enable users to submit or update their web form or web pages without having to reload it at all. Ajax can be a self updating javascript event or a user triggered javascript event in which a user will not experiencing page reload upon submission of request via form submit, or a javascript reload.

Show me the application?

ajax application can be found on most public web sites like yahoo mail and google mail. If you notice, all interactions with the database doesnt require the web page to reload at all. Only, some component will be refreshed. And this have given a lot of benefit to the end user and the application owner.

What is the benefit of applying this ajax thingy on my web project?

the most benefit comes from the fact that only portion of the web page is reloaded. For a big application like yahoo mail, it does save them a lot of bandwidth to begin with. just imagine, the amount of time it takes to reload the whole website and the time it takes to reload a small portion of it.

the next important thing is, since it uses mostly javascript events, the end user will notice an enhance visual experience of the page itself. the level of interactivity is raised to the level of rich client application, same as using java swing or visual basic applications.

last word

ajax is not a new technology, it has been there for years but its adoption have been slowed down by the motion that programmers were getting rid of rich client thin server application architecture. everything has to be web but again, with the ever increasing of ajax, the client is getting fatter from day to day.

for a more precise definition of ajax, please go to:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX and http://www.google.com.my/search?hl=en&q=define%3Aajax&meta=

this is most probably my first entry in secret school. i would be very brief and try to share my experience in developing and maintaining a CMS system. CMS system is basically a system to manage a website. So now, lets browse through the evolution of Content Management System.

there are actually many types of content management system. the simplest one would be to develop web pages by using a specific language like asp, php or ruby. In the older days, we web developer would try to distinguish static pages and dynamic pages. those static pages would be in html form. while the dynamic pages would be in one of the above mentioned scripting language. But my fav will always be PHP. Usually the dynamic pages would be the data driven pages like news, events and even guest book. This is actually the most tiring coding experience as you have to recode for different kinds of dynamic data.

next, the portal like system.  for example, my fav would be php-nuke. other variants of this portal cms system is xoops. most of us would refer these 2 beast to a portal community system. YES…its true but as we can see, many website owners are using it as you dont need to code anything. creating pages is simple, plus you can customize pages to suit different set of user. what do we need here is customize the template. some use smarty and some just a plain css file.

emm…whats next. In the past 2-3 years, there is an emergence of publish-to-file content management system. and many website owners has switched to this system. Why? it is simply, the published file is in html format or basically static and it speeds up the loading of the web page. this is indeed a sought after feature for heavily traficked websites.

then, some developer has indeed combine the feature of this publish-to-file system with those of the portal system. i think mambo is one of those and perhaps biline too. this is an ease to the developer or SI guys.

and the latest evolution of cms is in the form of blogs. blog is really cool. it enables a laymen to publish a website. for example, word press. the CMS for this website. One of the thing that i like about word press is, it has already started to adopt AJAX based transaction. if you notice, when you try to search for something, the website doesnt refresh, it simply push the result of your search in to left hand segment.

so folks, i think that is all about it. that is from my experience, and you may share your experience here too. maybe ive missed out something, but do post a comment.

remember “sharing is caring”.

remi