Nate's Programming Blog

Well I got my first taste of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) last week and I have to say that I’m impressed. I had already heard about AJAX and the XMLHttpRequest object, but I hadn’t actually gotten a chance to try it out. Last week I implemented one of the pages on the project that I’m working on to use AJAX to update the current status of a batch scheduler. Basically I have a javascript timer that goes to the server every 30 seconds to see if the batch scheduler is still running and what the status of the current job is. If the status changes I use javascript to modify the content on the page without having to reload the entire page. It works great and was real easy to implement. I was actually really impressed with how simple it was. I had it pretty much working in a couple of hours after working through some none AJAX bugs. I see this as being a great assett to web development. Basically it is greying the line between client server web applications (Applets/Flash) and server pages (JSP/ASP), and you don’t have the long download time. I will definately be considering AJAX for future webpage implementations.