Different Ways of Requesting Data

In most applications, it is very common to request data from a server and display it on a web page dynamically. In modern web applications, clients such as browsers request data from a server and only load content partially on the page. That prevents reloading the entire page to display the new data or content and provide a better user experience. For example, Tumblr is a social networking website with a huge database running in the backend. However, when we fetch data, there isn't a lot of loading time involved. The reason for this is the partial loading of the content. As the user scrolls down a Tumblr page, the content is loaded dynamically. Let's look at the following diagram:

Figure 14.6: Requesting data for partial update on the browser

We can see in the previous diagram that only partial data is being loaded onto the web page. The different methods used to fetch data from a server are:

• XMLHttpRequest...