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To help you decide whether AJAX is for you or not, here are some of the advantages it has over classic web development techniques:

• The interface is much more responsive, as explained before, because only a small part of the page is transferred at a time. The user has the feeling that changes are instantaneous.

• In a classic web application, when the web server sends a web page to the browser, it can use multiple connection threads to speed up delivery. However, this happens for content only – what is between the tags. All script and CSS files linked in the page's section are transferred using only one connection thread, which diminishes performance. With AJAX, you only have to load the basic scripts and CSS files, and request the rest as content, through multiple connections.

• Waiting time is reduced – when the visitor submits a form, they no longer have to wait for the entire page to be rebuilt and re-transmitted by the server. Instead, only the relevant content changes, and in non-critical cases, the visitor can still work while the data is being submitted.

• If a page section encounters an error, other sections are not affected (if not logically linked) and the data already entered by the user is not lost. This way, the application fails graciously, without causing head-aches for the users.

• Traffic to and from the server is reduced considerably – because you do not have to send the entire page content (CSS, images, static sections), the bandwidth usage is most likely to decrease.

Fastnet uses Ajax considerably...

As an example, fastnet used Ajax for the new Animal Friends insurance quote engine (www.animalfriends.org.uk) - saves users time and increasing the pleasure of filling in multiple forms and waiting for browser/server refresh times.