Recently Garret Smith of Adaptive Path made a good case for using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and coined the acronym "AJAX" to represent that notion. It is similar to the Remote IFrame technique in that things are handled on the client side, but as we shall see differs in significant ways. That article reminded me of our earlier work on this front and sparked my interest in Ajax. Part of that interest is in writing this article and sharing my efforts with the development community. To my way of thinking, Ajax is more a natural progression from an existing set of techniques as opposed to being something completely brand new. Yet within that progression, things are markedly different than in previous years in a couple of key areas: It provides a mechanism to mix and match xml with xhtml. It significantly reduces having to continually fetch things from a server (remote IFrame scripting is reasonably comparable here). It overcomes some speed bottlenecks that traditional Web development has fallen prey too. In most instances an Ajax based site will load quicker than a comparable traditional Web site. When done well, it significantly reduces initial load times.

This is an Ajax enhanced ticker script that lets you use a text file as the contents of the ticker to show! Easily define your messages, which support rich HTML, all inside this external text file. Now there's no more excuse to not update the contents of your ticker more often! Note that due to Ajax limitations, the ticker script and text file to draw from need to be on the same domain/server.As a side note, while we're labelling this script "XML ticker", technically, it's not XML, as the external file source is just a regular text file, not XML file. Since XML makes it cumbersome to include rich HTML inside it, we decided to go with a text file that's structured similar to XML instead

AJAX is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. AJAX is not a programming language, but simply a development technique for creating interactive web applications. AJAX uses JavaScript to send and receive data between a web browser and a web server. The AJAX technique makes web pages more responsive by exchanging data with a server behind the scenes, instead of reloading an entire web page each time a user makes a change. With AJAX, web applications can be faster, more interactive, and more user friendly. AJAX uses an XMLHTTPRequest object to send data to a web server, and XML is commonly used as the format for receiving server data, although any format, including plain text, can be used. AJAX is a technology that runs in your browser. It uses asynchronous data transfer between the browser and the web server, allowing web pages to request small bits of information from the server instead of whole pages.