Ajax: a new approach to web applications
So, I guess the name for the technology which Goolgle Maps, Google Suggest, Gmail, etc uses is called Ajax. Hmm… interesting.
The point of using Ajax to make web applications is to make them faster, and more snappy. When you use Ajax, you don’t have to reload the webpage to do a lot of things, and processing can be done on the client side.
This makes them more like desktop applications. The whole trend of web applications now is to make them seem more like native applications. You don’t have to “download” them, they just work when you go to the site.
On a side note, I think JavaScript is a really bad language for writing applications in. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it was never meant for it. Rather, it was meant for little popup boxes and slightly dynamic pages. Of course, you can completely adjust the content of pages dynamically, but still, it’s pretty bad. Another reason it is bad is because all the various browsers don’t implement it the same way, so the developer(s) end up testing in several different browsers which is really annoying. There has to be a better way.
Maybe that way is Java, which actually isn’t related to Javascript at all. It is more of a real programming language like C++v except for the fact that it is not compiled to a natie application, it is compiled to bytecode which requires a Java Virtual Machine to run. However, this means it can run on pretty much any operating system that is used today.
Here’s some related links:
JSON-RPC-Java – JavaScript to Java remote communication
DWR – Java library
Ajax Wiki