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AJAX to the Rescue!

Our recent work for Ticon Properties presented us with a challenging problem: the efficient display of floor plans. Many real estate sites display floor plans by having them display in pop-up windows. After launching a few of these, a visitor’s desktop can become littered with pop-up windows making comparisons between plans problematic. We felt that the plans should appear on the same page to allow comparisons, but traditional coding methods could only achieve this by reloading the page each time another floor plan was requested.

Designer Chris Sloan began to look for a solution and soon “discovered” AJAX. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) is a relatively new technology which was developed to make interactive web sites seem more responsive. Basically it utilizes the JavasScript XMLHttpRequest object to communicate with a server without the reloading of a page to display new content. In the Ticon site, it allowed us to load requested floor plans without having to reload the other elements on the page. Here’s what Sloan has to say about AJAX:

“With AJAX being a new technology, there is still a lot of buzz going around. Here at Imp Designs, we are just waiting to hear what Jakob Neilsen will cry and whine about with AJAX! As for right now, many people are praising the use of AJAX. Apple Computer utilizes AJAX found in some of their new applications and Google uses it with both their GMail email client and their mapping API. Many developers are creating “tool kits” to help the ease of interacting with the XMLHttpRequest object. A great tool kit that we have used is called SAJAX.  SAJAX is OpenSource BSD and takes care of all the code for different browser support, connecting to the XMLHttpRequest object, and processing the functions you pass to it through the server-side scripting language.  If you are at an intermediate level with JavaScript and your choice of server-side programming, a good tutorial on how to get started with AJAX can be found here. This will show you how to call the XMLHttpRequest object and gives examples of the JavaScript functions to process your server-side functions.

“There are many possibilities where AJAX can be used. I am finding out more about AJAX each time I work with it. As a web designer, I feel that AJAX is a great tool to help the web progress forward with usability standards.”

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