Oh my goodness, has it been that long since our last blogs/site activity!? We have been working hard on other projects recently, but I am pleased to say that we are back now and working on new and exciting gwycon projects.

One thing in the pipeline in the near future is a test/labs area on gwycon where we will be creating and experimenting with new (and existing technologies) such as Flash, Silverlight, WPF, C#, JavaScript, Ajax, PHP 5. Most of this information will be freely accessible but we are considering making certain sections available to subscribers who can access premium content. Any content accessible by subscription only (such as source code, scripts, windows applications etc.) would of course be Ok for users to implement in their own projects royalty free! Let us know what you think.

David

Ajax is the new buzz word floating around, but what exactly is it? Basically, it means you can send requests back to the server in the background and your web page can carry on happily doing other things – it doesn’t have to wait for a response to the request. Usually, when you click on something on a web page you have to wait for the whole page to be reloaded whilst a response is returned from the server. Not anymore with Ajax however! Using something called the XMLHttpRequest (or simply, XHR) requests can be sent to the server, and ONLY relevant portions of a web page need to be updated accordingly.

This may not sound like much but the benefits to the user are not having to wait around for the page to be constantly reloaded every time a link is clicked on, giving web pages much more of an interactive feel to them, similar to a desktop application. One of the most common examples I have seen Ajax implemented is in the backend of content management systems (CMS), where the user can set various options by dragging elements around rather than just by clicking on standard links.

However, there are numerous disadvantages to Ajax simply because at its core it makes heavy use of JavaScript, and of course the user has to have this enabled in the browser or it won’t work. This is the same old problem with using JavaScript, it is a powerful language but not 100% visible if turned off in the browser. See the Wiki Ajax page for the full low down on this new technology.