Internet scripting technology continues to evolve to highly dynamic medium. Developers continue to stretch the boundaries of what is available and as a result, the development of more robust development tools has become necessary. One of these tools that are available to web developers is the Ajax platform. Ajax has brought about visible distinctions in web applications, especially in what are called page requests. In order to make a call to a server, a web-based application has to send an http request to the server and wait for the results to be displayed through a page reload. In the majority of reloaded pages, most of the elements remain the same and only a few elements, mostly form fields, undergo a change. This results in unnecessarily page elements refreshing such as background images, menus and logos and taking a lot of bandwidth in the process.
Ajax together with Ajax libraries offer solutions to this problem. Acting as an extra layer that is between the server and the users browser, Ajax handles background server communications and allows results to be seamlessly integrated into the page being viewed without the need for the user waiting for the page to be refreshed. In fact, these background server requests do not have to be synchronized with, say clicking of buttons. They can occur while the user is busy with other activities on the web page oblivious of what is going on in the background.
As with other developing technologies, it was not until the development of Ajax libraries that developers could now simplify the creation of Ajax applications. Libraries make code more resilient and in case of Ajax, can be used to set up callback functions that are responsible for intercepting any responses coming from the server. Some Ajax libraries, known as toolkits, include many utilities that go beyond the capabilities of Ajax. Some libraries like the DWR toolkit provide plumbing to connect to server-side classes. This means that less JavaScript code will need to be written and it is also a lot easier to see exactly what the application is doing.
Ajax libraries save coders the tedious and error-prone work of writing code over and over again. Libraries have a lot of reusable code and development of custom features can enhance the maintainability of code even further. For example, by fixing a bug in one of the Ajax libraries, the changes made can then be propagated by dropping the new improved library into the deploy directory. Who knows, you may end up creating an improved, if not a new, library that other developers can use in their projects.
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