The term ajax has multiple uses, although it is not part of the dictionary prepared by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). This could be, for example, the name of a famous Dutch soccer team.
The Amsterdamsche Football Club Ajax, which is usually named Ajax, was founded in 1900. The team competes in the First Division of the Dutch tournament, where it has won more than thirty trophies. He even became a European champion on several occasions.
Johan Cruyff, Frank Rijkaard, Marco van Basten, Ronald and Frank de Boer, Dennis Bergkamp, Patrick Kluivert, Clarence Seedorf, Marc Overmars and Edgar Davids are some of the great footballers who have worn the Ajax shirt.
When the concept appears written in capital letters (AJAX), it is an acronym that, in Spanish, refers to the expression “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML”. AJAX, within this framework, is a technique used in the field of computing for the development of interactive web applications. The AJAX applications have the particularity to run in the browser Internet, simultaneously communication between the browser and the server takes place in the background.
It is important to understand that AJAX is not a single technology, but a combination of several, and that it has existed for many years. Among the languages that are merged to make programming in AJAX are XML, Javascript, HTML and CSS.
Thanks to such an implementation we can achieve results of an impossible dynamism with HTML alone, for example. The secret is that, unlike an old website, where once a page is finished loading on the client’s computer, it no longer downloads information from the server, AJAX is able to maintain constant communication without completely refresh the page, as if it were a silent update of the contents.
Let’s see below the explanation of each part of this acronym:
* “Asynchronous” refers to the fact that from the time the client requests information from the server until the response arrives, the page does not stop working, but rather that the experience continues normally and, in general, the user can continue interacting with the rest of the the elements, even canceling your request (for example, closing a pop-up box showing the communication status). As soon as the exchange between the server and the client is finished, a “behind the scenes” response is prepared, which finally generates the desired change in the content (for example, going from the “News” section to “Store”);
* «Javascript» is the language used to instantiate an AJAX type response, it analyzes its content and finally updates the DOM (the «Document Object Model», that is, the interface with which the representation is possible of web documents, XML and XHTML);
* To make the request to the server, the client uses the XMLHttpRequest or XHR API. An API (“Application Programming Interface”) is a series of methods used to specify the communication rules between two parties. It is important to note that the response does not have to be in XML, but can be in any format.
With tilde in the first A (Ájax), the term refers to two different characters from the mythology of Ancient Greece: Ájax (or Áyax) the Great, the son of Peribea and Telamón; and Ajax (or Ajax) the Lesser, a descendant of Oileo.
A genus of plants, a model ships, and a brand of chemicals used for cleaning also share the designation of ajax.
