Chapter 6. Sending Data with Ajax

The term Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) was coined by Jesse James Garrett in 2005. Since then it has come to represent many different things, as the term encompasses a group of related capabilities and techniques. At its most basic level, an Ajax solution includes the following technologies:

• JavaScript: This is used to capture interactions with the user or other browser-related events and to interpret the data from the server and present it on the page

• XMLHttpRequest: This allows requests to be made to the server without interrupting other browser tasks

• Textual data: The server provides data in a format such as XML, HTML, or JSON

Ajax has been hailed as the savior of the web landscape, transforming static web pages into interactive web applications. Unsurprisingly, browsers are not entirely consistent with regard to their implementations of the XMLHttpRequest object, but jQuery will assist us in taming this feature.

In this chapter, we will cover:

• Loading...