California Ajax Solutions Team

www.CalAST.com

It's pretty simple to see many of the benefits obtained from this approach. First, it improves performance. No one wants to sit around and wait for pages to load, and it's very clear when this is happening. By "backgrounding" the activity and changing the page as needed when the results show up, things just move along more quickly - users like that.

The ability to respond to user actions and change the page (retrieving information on an as-needed basis from the server) allows for web pages to behave in a context-sensitive way. That is, some decision made by the user (choosing a brand of automobile) changes the context for future actions (choosing a model) to something simpler that users can deal with more easily. Users like that, too. Can you imagine what it would be like to choose a model of car from a list of every single model made by every manufacturer, all in one big list? Clearly, this is an unreasonable burden to place on your users, and Ajax techniques provide you with a way to work around it.

The manipulation of the DOM, very common in Ajax applications, also allows for more interesting web sites. You don't need to fetch a whole new page from the server for every action. If the user clicks a button that results in seeing a form to fill out, the form can be inserted near the button, sliding the rest of the page down to make room for it. When the form is submitted by the user, that space is recovered, and the form just disappears with the hole that was made for it closing up automatically. Surely that's better than going to a different page with the form on it, and losing all the rest of the information the user was viewing.

I've described only a minimal set of features, behaviors, and benefits for the Ajax approach to web design. There are many more, but at least you can understand some of the reasons why more web sites are being designed this way every day.