I’ve been thinking about AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) a lot over the last few days. After working as a PHP developer at a company back in 2009 and then moving to New Zealand to do a PG Diploma in Computer Science, I remember hearing the word AJAX quite often, before I actually got a chance to work on creating websites again in 2011.
After two years of hearing about and seeing what people were doing with AJAX, I couldn’t wait to learn how to use it in the next website or application I built. All that time, I imagined it would be too difficult for me to learn.
But after just a few days of playing around with the syntax, PJAX, and some of the tools around it, I remember the joy when I finally had a webpage move from one state to another without a full page reload. Full page reloads had always been a requirement before, but now I could replace just part of the page with new content. The possibilities this opened up felt endless.
Other than the marquee tag, which made text move out of view and then back in the view again, and AJAX, very few things in web UI design have brought me as much joy.
