Ajax Mistakes

• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Inforec Association 2007-01-01
• Series: Informatică economică
• Subjects: Web Technologies; Web Frameworks; AJAX; Asynchronous HTTP Request; User-friendly Interfaces
• Online Access: http://www.revistaie.ase.ro/content/42/nemedi-nr.2.pdf

Ajax, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability. However, there are several common mistakes using it, like: using Axaj just for the sake of Ajax, moreover the back button of the browser become unuseful, there might be a delay displaying enhanced GUI widgets, offline content is not supported, concurrent page loading is dramatically slowed down, sensitive information might be sent encrypted, cross-browser implementation is not one of developers primary concerns, concurrent access is not well supported, running the entire application on the client side makes it slower, there is no support for user without a JavaScript enable browser, GUI might change unexpectedly, there are no URLs which may be referred and indexed by users and search engines, pop-up blockers might kill opening windows, there are a lot of asynchronous operations happening in the background which might be difficult to be controlled, inventing new controls which are less intuitive than the classic ones, style and internationalization issues due to partial page rendering, the lack of data posted back from the user, Web traffic cannot be reported for each section of a given site.