Understanding AJAX and ASP.NET

What Is AJAX?

AJAX formalizes a style of programming meant to improve the UI responsiveness and visual appeal of Web sites. Many AJAX capabilities have been available for a while now. AJAX consolidates several good ideas and uses them to define a style of programming and extends the standard HTTP mechanism that is the backbone of the Internet. Like most Web application development environments, ASP.NET takes advantage of HTTP capabilities in a very standard way. The browser usually initiates contact with the server using an HTTP GET request, followed by any number of POSTs. The high-level application flow is predicated upon sending a whole request and then waiting for an entire reply from the server. Although the ASP.NET server-side control architecture greatly improves back-end programming, users still get their information a whole page at a time. It operates almost like the mainframe/terminal model popular during the 1970s and early 1980s. However, this time the terminal is one of many modern sophisticated browsers and the mainframe is replaced by a Web server (or Web farm).

The standard HTTP round-trip has been a useful application strategy, and the Web grew up using it. While the Web was developing in the late 1990s, browsers had widely varying degrees of functionality. For example, browsers ranged all the way from the rudimentary America Online Browser (which had very limited capabilities) to cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), to more sophisticated browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, which were rich in capability. For instance, Internet Explorer supports higher level features such as JavaScript and Dynamic HTML. This made striking a balance between usability of your site and the reach of your site very difficult prior to the advent of ASP.NET.

However, the majority of modern computing platforms can run a decent browser that can process client-side scripting. These days, most computing environments run a modern operating system, such as the Windows Vista or Windows 7 operating systems, or even Macintosh OS X. These environments run browsers fully capable of supporting XML and JavaScript. With so many Web client platforms supporting this functionality, it makes sense to take advantage of the capabilities. As you see later in this chapter, AJAX makes good use of these modern browser features to improve the user experience.

In addition to extending standard HTTP, AJAX is also a very clever way to use the Web service idiom. Web services are traditionally geared toward enterprise-to-enterprise business communications. However, Web services are also useful on a smaller scale for handling Web requests out of band. (“Out of band” simply means making HTTP requests using other methods instead of the standard page posting mechanism.) AJAX uses Web services behind the scenes to make the client UI more responsive than it is for traditional HTTP GETs and POSTs. This chapter describes how this works, especially in the section titled “Extender Controls” later in the chapter, which describes the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit extender controls.