AJAX: Not Just a Household Cleanser May 04, 2010, by Peter Mirus in Other
If the article on Wikipedia is reliable, Ajax cleanser was introduced by Colgate-Palmolive in 1947, with the slogan “Stronger than dirt!” (Ironically, if you visit the related page at Wikipedia, you will see “This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.”) [Emphasis added.]
The Wikipedia article also points out that an early jingle for Ajax featured these words: “You’ll stop paying the elbow tax, when you start cleaning with Ajax.”
AJAX is also the acronym for “asynchronous JavaScript and XML”—and ironically, the early jingle still applies. Indeed, AJAX does help you to “stop paying the elbow tax”, meaning that if implemented properly, the web developer’s brand of AJAX will help you to spend less time performing common “household (read “business”) tasks.
Those who only vaguely know what JavaScript or XML are—in other words, most of us—have a hard time understanding why AJAX makes that big of a difference, and what value it carries. So, the value of AJAX is better revealed not by talking about what AJAX is, but what it does for you, the user.
Example from Real Life: Account Management
Let’s just say that you have a web-based business application that allows you to manage your customers: more than 25,000 of them. There is a good deal of information stored about these customers. When you access the customer’s records you have a number of tabs that allow you to access different parts of the customer record: addresses, purchasing history, billing history, sales communications log, customer complaints, etc.
In a traditional web application, not using AJAX, there are one of two options for the application developer that affect you, the user. First, the software engineer can choose to have all of the data for all of the tabs loaded when you first access the page. This allows instant access to the data when you click on a tab. However, this increases the time that it takes the web page to load dramatically, because so much information is being returned at once.
Second, the engineer can load the information for each tab individually (when you click on it), while refreshing the web page. However, this means that you have to wait while every page element reloads. Eight tabs, and you have to load the entire page and all of its elements for each tab. You see this form of application in any situation where a lot of account data needs to be reviewed. Click a tab, wait for the page to be refreshed. It...takes...a lot...of time.
The burden falls on you, the user, to click and wait. It’s the virtual equivalent of having to “pay the elbow tax”—more time/work needed to get the result that you need.
By contrast, in an “AJAXified” customer data program, another option is introduced: AJAX allows the your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, what have you) to speak directly to the server without a page refresh. Exercising this option, when you first access the customer record, the page loads very quickly because data is only being loaded for the first navigation tab. Then, as you click on each of the other tabs, the data for the selected tab is loaded instantly without requiring a page refresh. This speeds things up considerably (and provides additional return on investment that I won’t get into here).
Another Example: The Search-as-you-type Box
Another common place you will see AJAX implemented is in “search while you type” mechanisms on websites. Before AJAX, you would enter the full key word or phrase, click Search, and then wait to see the results. With AJAX, common search phrases (or actual search results) are suggested to you as you type—which both helps you to see if you are on the right track and helps you to avoid misspelling words that you don’t commonly use, such as “onomatopoeia”.
In a customer database environment, you might start typing the last name of a customer and watch the matching customers appear as you provide the information. “Br” brings up both all “Browns” and “Bryants”, add the “a” and you see just the “Bryants”. (You get the idea.) You can access the record you need so quickly, and once you get to the record itself, access the data so fluidly (as in the first example)! What’s not to love?
So, “clean up” your web applications with AJAX to “stop paying the elbow tax”. Moreover, demand the same from companies who provide the web applications that you use every day—so that you can perform work more efficiently while using their systems. Or, choose a new application that provides a better user experience by making use of AJAX (or a different method that provides the same advantages).
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