Devoted to hardware, software, IT issues, and information technology management

Ajax is a prevalent sight in so many new Web 2.0 sites nowadays. The momentum is taking off with the wave of Web 2.0 web applications being rolled out in recent months or 2006. For a web developer, Ajax requires a different way of thinking, as the traditional round trip communication between the web server and the browser is no longer necessary. The data returned to the browser no longer has to have a full xhtml compliant structure to be rendered. In fact, they can be injected into any existing html element on the page and be considered structurally part of that page (there must be some security implications here, surely ?!). Why is this a good thing ? Think interactivity ! You can allow visitors to vote, take surveys, chat etc. without ever leaving the page. Sure, all this used to be made possible using hidden frames and iframes, but the advantage is the new Ajax model ensures all the elements are still part of the same page and you do not have to traverse the DOM (Document Object Model) to get to the part of the page you want to update.

I like Ajax because :

I do not like Ajax because (well, to be more precise, these are the gotchas) :