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A few things have made me want to explain something that's a bit technical to non-technical folks. Namely, because the latest "next big thing" that's running around: AJAX. Now, in common with most things of this type, it may well be not around in 6 months time (despite the doubt of how this could be from people right now), and at a certain level it's just another confusing buzzword that no-one aside from web designers needs to know. But on the other hand, for those of us who spend a significant portion of their lives on the web (and most people who read my LJ are likely in that category), it's starting to effect us, and so I'd like to show why it's an interesting paradigm shift.
Blah over. AJAX is an enabling set of techniques for web applications. Up until this point, a web application has generally consisted of the idea "fill in form, click submit, wait, wait, recieve results". This model is annoying however. The major problem is the response time. That couple of second wait (even on fast connections+computers) makes a web application *feel* so much different to a program running on your desktop. Contrast this to something like Google Maps. Try dragging the map around. Watch as it loads up new map sections as you move around. Try moving the zoom slider on the left hand side. Even try searching for somewhere. Especially if it's somewhere nearby to where you're already looking, you'll get dragged there rather than loading a whole darn new page. And that's the big thing about AJAX. If the page needs a small change (e.g. shift map small distance to the right), why reload the whole page to do it? Only reloading what's needed, and keeping everything else makes it seem so much faster. Your browser is still doing the same old "request a page" thing in the background, but you're not noticing it so much because most of the page doesn't change. And that's true for most programs. Most of the interface does not change from one moment to the next, so why bother reloading the whole thing? Here's another fun thing that many AJAX apps do - they respond to keypresses. Google Maps for example - make sure you've got the map selected (click on any part of it to do so) and then try pushing an arrow key. Watch how it acts like you'd expect a desktop application to respond. And all of this without any plugins :-)
So you get the idea. Google has quite a few things like this (Gmail for example - although they don't refer to them as AJAX), and Flickr is another good example (have a look at an item from my photos page for example, and note the boxes that popup as you go over the picture. They were added using a simple AJAX app). The thing that actually spawned me towards doing this was the Google Suggest extension for Firefox. As the privacy notice says 'The Google Suggest Extension sends your search query to Google while you are still typing it, instead of waiting for you to hit the "Enter" key' - think of it as autocompletion for search queries, but based on what has been searched on before by *everyone* as opposed to just you. It's very cool. It's not a pure AJAX app, but in the context of Firefox's XUL nature, it could practically be considered as such.
Blah over. AJAX is an enabling set of techniques for web applications. Up until this point, a web application has generally consisted of the idea "fill in form, click submit, wait, wait, recieve results". This model is annoying however. The major problem is the response time. That couple of second wait (even on fast connections+computers) makes a web application *feel* so much different to a program running on your desktop. Contrast this to something like Google Maps. Try dragging the map around. Watch as it loads up new map sections as you move around. Try moving the zoom slider on the left hand side. Even try searching for somewhere. Especially if it's somewhere nearby to where you're already looking, you'll get dragged there rather than loading a whole darn new page. And that's the big thing about AJAX. If the page needs a small change (e.g. shift map small distance to the right), why reload the whole page to do it? Only reloading what's needed, and keeping everything else makes it seem so much faster. Your browser is still doing the same old "request a page" thing in the background, but you're not noticing it so much because most of the page doesn't change. And that's true for most programs. Most of the interface does not change from one moment to the next, so why bother reloading the whole thing? Here's another fun thing that many AJAX apps do - they respond to keypresses. Google Maps for example - make sure you've got the map selected (click on any part of it to do so) and then try pushing an arrow key. Watch how it acts like you'd expect a desktop application to respond. And all of this without any plugins :-)
So you get the idea. Google has quite a few things like this (Gmail for example - although they don't refer to them as AJAX), and Flickr is another good example (have a look at an item from my photos page for example, and note the boxes that popup as you go over the picture. They were added using a simple AJAX app). The thing that actually spawned me towards doing this was the Google Suggest extension for Firefox. As the privacy notice says 'The Google Suggest Extension sends your search query to Google while you are still typing it, instead of waiting for you to hit the "Enter" key' - think of it as autocompletion for search queries, but based on what has been searched on before by *everyone* as opposed to just you. It's very cool. It's not a pure AJAX app, but in the context of Firefox's XUL nature, it could practically be considered as such.
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