<bg*****@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:11**********************@g14g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...
Well, besides an HttpRequest, what are the other possibilities of data
transmission and specifically, what other possibilities did not exist
before the AJAX buzzword was invented?
There were several. I'm assuming you're talking about bi-directional
communication between a server and client (browser) without refreshing the
currently displayed page. I'm not sure what you mean by "did not exist
before" - all of these existed before the word "AJAX" was coined as well as
the techniques commonly associated with AJAX. There isn't anything new
about AJAX except the name.
Off the top of my head:
+) Iframe/frame communication (communication would take place in a tiny
iframe or frame whose only purpose, generally, was bi-directional
communication with the server).
+) Java/ActiveX/Flash: These active client-side elements (and several
others) all have the capability of doing a "background" request from a
server and passing data, as an intermediary, between server-side code and
client-side script.
+) Inline Image Requests/Cookies. Since the early days JavaScript has had
the capability to manipulate the src value of and img tag. By passing URL
values on this call and receiving data back via cookies you could set up
bi-directional communication.
+) Both Netscape and IE had custom solutions in the very early days for what
they called the "push" metaphor which allowed information to be pumped
continuously into the open page without explicit refreshes. Since there
have been many browser-specific methods (I think IE's "remote scripting
toolkit" may have been the last major one).
There are others. There've been ways to do this stuff for years and lots of
people have come up with lots of clever solutions.
All AJAX really did was give a label to the idea and, in my opinion, a label
designed more for it's acronym that for it's application. While the label
specifically indicates "asynchronous" and "XML" for example the same tasks
can be done synchronously and with other encoding techniques (for example
JSON is a popular non-XML "AJAX" tool).
We really need a neat little buzzword to describe just plain
behind-the-scenes server-to-client communication. Then we'd stop seeing so
much overuse of the word "AJAX". The real revolution is that, not
specifically asynchronous XML.
That's just my opinion of course.
Jim Davis