When an Ajax request is made, jQuery determines the best mechanism available for retrieving the data. This transport could be the standard XMLHttpRequest object, the Microsoft ActiveX XMLHTTP object, or a <script> tag.
Because the transport used can vary from request to request, we need a common interface in order to interact with the communication. The jqXHR object provides this interface for us. It is a wrapper for the XMLHttpRequest object when that transport is used, and in other cases, it simulates XMLHttpRequest as best it can. Among the properties and methods it exposes are:
- .responseText or .responseXML, containing the returned data
- .status and .statusText, containing a status code and description
- .setRequestHeader() to manipulate the HTTP headers sent with the request
- .abort() to prematurely halt the transaction
This jqXHR object is returned from all of jQuery's Ajax...