Introduction to Ajax

JavaScript can pass requests to the server

Some people claim that Ajax is an acronym (standing for "Asyncronous JavaScript and XML"). The person who "invented" the term (but not the technique) claims that it is not an acronym. Regardless of which view you take, Ajax means calling server side processing from JavaScript to update a small part of the content without having to reload the entire page. To be able to do this we need to know both how to retrieve the information from the server and how to make changes to the content of the current web page. We'll start by looking at retrieving information from the server and this starts with defining a JavaScript XMLHttpRequest Object.