AJAX Isn’t Just All-Purpose SOAP…

AJAX Isn’t Just All-Purpose SOAP…

Justin Schultz has posted this extensive introduction to Ajax over on his blog.

In this post, my goal is to provide you with a thorough AJAX primer and give you a real-world illustration of its usefulness. Later, I’ll demonstrate the benefits of AJAX using a test case application for a chemical sales company. First, I’ll illustrate the immediate advantages by using an application that I built for a medical insurance company a few years ago that allowed customers to proximity search for medical providers near their homes.

It’s much easier (at least for me) to learn when there’s a goal set ahead of you, so it’s good that he starts with the medical insurance app example. He describes how, by integrating Ajax into the application, he was able to reduce the time that the search would be broken down into smaller, bite-sized requests instead of the large, slow ones previously used.

He notes that Ajax features take some of the load off of the server and push it out to the client, where more and more machines can handle much more than the casual web site can throw at them. He gets into what Ajax is (the technical aspects) and looks at a different test case (with sample app) to illustrate some of the real life stats differences that Ajax-enabling your site can produce. He wraps it up with a confirmation of Ajax’s benefits and some links to external resources for more information.

[via Ajaxian]