Building efficient websites with AJAX
Breezy Browsing
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Books were the original model for website design. Navigation was similar to flipping the pages. Thanks to AJAX, many state-of-the-art websites now behave like desktop applications.
The standards for an impressive Internet presentation have changed substantially since Tim Berners-Lee created the first web pages. Internet sites increasingly remind the surfer of interactive desktop applications rather than printed material. AJAX is a technology based on JavaScript that adds convenience, with pull-down menus, sortable tables, and interactive input pages. The main improvement is the absence of delays typically experienced while pages reloaded.
Long Way
Before rendering a website, the browser and web server go through a number of steps (Figure 1):
- The browser sends a page request to a web server.
- The server processes the request and serves up the HTML text and images. This might take a couple of seconds if the load is heavy. The network transmission speed decides how fast the content is delivered. The required time is still noticeable on fast intranets, however.
- Finally, the browser reads the response and displays the page. The same sequence is repeated for each image before the browser can render the final version of the page.
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