Ajax

[sravanthi]

we are planning to develop a new portal which should be based on AJAX. but as i know nothing about it, unable to get an idea of what it is.
can anyone give me the basic idea of what AJAX is and how to use it.
all i know about AJAX is AJAX-Asynchronous JAVA XML.

[benihana]

sorry, but if you dont know what it is, why are planning to build a site with it?

sounds like youve heard of a solution, and need to work out what the problem is, i.e. back to front

[edited by: benihana at 3:47 pm (utc) on Nov. 25, 2005]

[DaveN]

google Maps is ajax

DaveN

[elgumbo]

I've had a quick look at it and as far as I can tell it's a method of using javascript to make changes on the fly to a page. Gmail and Google maps are both high profile uses of Ajax.

The main problem that I found was that as the sites are written in Javascript the content is practically invisible to search engine spiders - a bit like webmaster world at the moment ;) This may or may not be a concern to you. You could probably build something similar with Flash if it's not. There may also be problems with accessibility as well, you may need to check that.

I've seen a couple of example ecommerce sites using Ajax and no doubt about it they do look very good: pick up the item you want with your mouse and drop it straight into the basket.