AJAX is the art of exchanging data with a server, and updating parts of a web page - without reloading the whole page.
What is AJAX?
AJAX = Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.
In short; AJAX is about loading data in the background and display it on the webpage, without reloading the whole page.
Examples of applications using AJAX: Gmail, Google Maps, Youtube, and Facebook tabs.
You can learn more about AJAX in our AJAX
tutorial.
What About jQuery and AJAX?
jQuery provides several methods for AJAX functionality.
With the jQuery AJAX methods, you can request text, HTML, XML, or JSON from a remote server using both HTTP Get and HTTP Post - And you can load the external data directly into the selected HTML elements of your web page!
Without jQuery, AJAX coding can be a bit tricky!
Writing regular AJAX code can be a bit tricky, because different browsers have different
syntax for AJAX implementation. This means that you will have to write extra code
to test for different browsers. However, the jQuery team has taken care of this
for us, so that we can write AJAX functionality with only one single line of code.
jQuery AJAX Methods
In the next chapters we will look at the most important jQuery AJAX methods.