AJAX. Not a soap!!!

[moodsey211]

Ajax, or AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a group of interrelated web development techniques used to create interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. The use of Ajax has led to an increase in interactive animation on web pages. Data is retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object or through the use of Remote Scripting in browsers that do not support it. Despite the name, the use of JavaScript and XML is not actually required, nor do the requests need to be asynchronous. The acronym AJAX has thus changed to the term Ajax, which does not represent these specific technologies.

Advantages

    * In many cases, related pages on a website consist of much content that is common between them. Using traditional methods, that content would have to be reloaded on every request. However, using Ajax, a web application can request only the content that needs to be updated, thus drastically reducing bandwidth usage and load time.
    * The use of asynchronous requests allows the client's Web browser UI to be more interactive and to respond quickly to inputs, and sections of pages can also be reloaded individually. Users may perceive the application to be faster or more responsive, even if the application has not changed on the server side.
    * The use of Ajax can reduce connections to the server, since scripts and style sheets only have to be requested once.
    * State can be maintained throughout a Web site. JavaScript variables will persist because the main container page need not be reloaded.


Disadvantages

    * Pages dynamically created using successive Ajax requests do not automatically register themselves with the browser's history engine, so clicking the browser's "back" button may not return the user to an earlier state of the Ajax-enabled page, but may instead return them to the last full page visited before it. Workarounds include the use of invisible IFrames to trigger changes in the browser's history and changing the anchor portion of the URL (following a #) when AJAX is run and monitoring it for changes.
    * Dynamic web page updates also make it difficult for a user to bookmark a particular state of the application. Solutions to this problem exist, many of which use the URL fragment identifier (the portion of a URL after the '#') to keep track of, and allow users to return to, the application in a given state.
    * Because most web crawlers do not execute JavaScript code, web applications should provide an alternative means of accessing the content that would normally be retrieved with Ajax, to allow search engines to index it.
    * Any user whose browser does not support Ajax or JavaScript, or simply has JavaScript disabled, will not be able to use its functionality. Similarly, devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, and screen readers may not have support for JavaScript or the XMLHttpRequest object. Also, screen readers that are able to use Ajax may still not be able to properly read the dynamically generated content. The only way to let the user carry out functionality is to fall back to non-JavaScript. This can be achieved by making sure links and forms can be resolved properly and rely not solely on Ajax. In JavaScript, form submission could then be halted with "return false".
    * The same origin policy prevents Ajax from being used across domains, although the W3C has a draft that would enable this functionality.
    * Opens up another attack vector for malicious code that web developers might not fully test for.


source:

Code:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX

[flashMaster]

wikes gaya na ani wui hehehe!

maybe u cn think of soap as a wrapper to a kisses chocolate
while u and ur friends are the ajax tossing it around.

consider it like a secure wrapper especially nowadays when
everybody's concentrated on using distributed systems, rpcs
and such wherein it has these dtds, ns schematics for checking
errors and validations and stuff

maybe some can start by studying ur xhtml's headers for structures like:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xml:lang="en" lang="en">

[moodsey211]

I guess you have the title of this thread wrong. It says AJAX. Not a soap. It's actually referring to the AJAX techniques. The soap there is not referring to Simple Object Access Protocol, but rather it is referring to a detergent use in washing where there also exist a brand name called AJAX.  Thus having the title above.

But since you mention it. What's the connection between AJAX and SOAP? It's applications to solve real life problems?

[flashMaster]

no wonder d letters are small.  i was thinkin' of an acronym hahaha my bad sorry! 

ajax can still use / implement soap but it can be a bit tricky especially when you're trying
to maintain it for future uses.

when referring to their relationships, think of it this way:  use SOAP instead of HTTP.
everytime a new protocol or item is introduced, there r standards to b strictly followed.
the reason for this is that there are / will be many companies that will be implementing them
like, jquery contributors, adobe, microsoft (even though they helped implemented this one),
sun and such.

without the standard specs, each of them would generate different outputs or far out
mechanisms, which could result on a bad business.  and we don't mean businesses in
thousands or millions, these r billions worth of $$$.  and mind u me, these people would
really sue hehehe!!!

imagine an http standard client error 404 that means "not found".  adobe might have
implemented it as "blocked" or sun might have implemented it as "request time out" if
it wasn't for those massively detailed specs.

[flashMaster]

...while AJAX is a technique (usually for interactive purposes) to send / retrieve data using such protocols.

AJAX <--> Protocol (data / kisses chocolate  ) Protocol <-->  Any storage type

[moodsey211]

so in short, SOAP is just like the HTTP. right? And AJAX could be used to dynamically retrieve and render it.