AJAX

2005 will definitely be remembered as the rise of AJAX – the new development technique that many believe will blur the line between web-based and desktop applications. This mystical acronym, authored by Adaptive Path in mid February, is a label for the rich, highly responsive and interactive interfaces of AJAX-enabled applications. It stands for “Asynchronous JavaScript + XML”.

The advantages of AJAX-enabled applications to classic ones can be summarized as follows:

• Better Performance and Efficiency—the key advantage of AJAX applications is the significantly higher performance, which is a result of the small amount of data transferred from the server. This makes the AJAX technique especially beneficial for data-intensive applications (e.g. displaying rich reports, browsing through large data structures) as well as for low-bandwidth networks.
• More Responsive Interfaces—the improved performance leads to much more responsive interfaces, which create the illusion that updates are happening instantly. As a result the AJAX web applications appear to behave much like their desktop counterparts. 
• Reduced or Eliminated "Waiting" Time—in AJAX-based applications only the relevant page elements are updates, with the rest of the page remaining unchanged. This approach eliminates the white screen (or page flicker on faster connections) and significantly decreases the idle waiting time.