Chapter 6. AJAX—How to Make Your Site Buzzword-Compliant

	Life’s a bee without a buzz It’s going great till you get stung
	-- Devo, “That’s Good”

AJAX was the name of a great Greek warrior (actually, two Greek warriors) whose adventures were chronicled in Homer’s epic, The Iliad. The term was later re-coined as the name of a household cleanser. It was then re-re-coined as a label for a group of web technologies.

In this last, most modern sense, AJAX is an acronym standing for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. The technologies involved in an AJAX solution include:

• JavaScript, to capture interactions with the user or other browser-related events

• The XMLHttpRequest object, which allows requests to be made to the server without interrupting other browser tasks

• XML files on the server, or possibly other similar data formats

• More JavaScript, to interpret the data from the server and present it on the page

AJAX technology has been hailed as the savior of the web landscape, transforming static web...