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Saturday, 24 May 2008 |
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Switched on developers who's clients have tight budgets are moving forward with Ajax in brilliant ways.
To help you decide whether AJAX is for
you or not, here are some of the advantages it has over classic web
development techniques:
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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 <body> tags. All script and CSS files linked in the page's <head>
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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