AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ajax technology was introduced first by Microsoft back in 1999 and had been known as DHTML/JavaScript web application with remote calls. AJAX is not a new programming language, but a new technique for creating better, faster, and more interactive web applications.
With AJAX, a JavaScript can communicate directly with the server, with the XMLHttpRequest object. With this object, a JavaScript can trade data with a web server, without reloading the page.
AJAX uses asynchronous data transfer (HTTP requests) between the browser and the web server, allowing web pages to request small bits of information from the server instead of whole pages.

Ajax technology consists of five parts.
  1. HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)
  2. JavaScript
  3. DHTML (Dynamic Hyper Text Markup Language)
  4. DOM (Document Object Model)
  5. XML (Extensible Markup Language)
With the help of cooperation and collaboration of these technologies, they can optimize the conventional enterprise information system by using an asynchronous way. Meanwhile, a quickly responded and smoother user interface was provided. Enterprise information system with Ajax can be operated in a more efficient way, which means even use the current hardware, it can provide more load capacity, be more stable and serve more clients in parallel. In this paper: we present two kinds of information system models, one using conventional B/S architecture and the other use Ajax-enhanced B/S architecture.

TECHNOLOGIES USED IN AJAX

The term AJAX has come to represent a broad group of web technologies that can be used to implement a web application that communicates with a server in the background, without interfering with the current state of the page. To implement AJAX the following technologies are required:
  • XHTML (Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) for presentation
  • the Document Object Model for dynamic display of and interaction with data
  • XML (Extensible Markup Language) and XSLT (Extensible Stylish Language Transformation) for the interchange, and manipulation and display, of data, respectively
  • the XMLHttpRequest (Extensible Markup Language Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) object for asynchronous Communication 

USERS OF AJAX

Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach. All of the major products Google has introduced over the last year Orkut, Gmail, the latest beta version of Google Groups, Google Suggest, and Google Maps are Ajax applications.
BROWSERS SUPPORTING AJAX
  • Google Chrome
  • Apple Safari
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 and above
  • Mozilla/Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and above
  • Netscape 7.1 and above
  • Konqueror
  • Opera 7.6 and above

Conclusion

The AJAX technique makes Internet applications smaller, faster and more user-friendly. AJAX is a technology, which breaks the paradigm of page reload and saves a lot of bandwidth. It can send and retrieve the data without reloading the web page, meaning, that gone are the days where for each data retrieval, we needed to reload the complete web page.