How AJAX Works: 10 Practical Uses For AJAX

4 min readDec 21, 2021

AJAX has grown in popularity over time, allowing web programmes to behave more and more like desktop applications. AJAX may provide a lot of extra functionality that would be impossible to provide any other way.

What Is AJAX? How Does It Work?

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is used to communicate between the client and server sides of an application. There was no mechanism for a web application’s client side to communicate directly with the server before AJAX. You’d have to rely on page loads instead. The client and server can easily communicate with one other thanks to AJAX.

Here is how the usual AJAX script goes:

The event is triggered by some action, such as the user hitting a button.
The AJAX call is activated, and it sends an XML request to a server-side script.
The server-side script (PHP, ASP, or whatever) gets the data from JavaScript, processes it, and can access the database if necessary.
The script delivers the data back to the original client-side page that performed the request, this time using XML.
The data is caught by a second JavaScript code, called a callback function, which changes the web page.

Throughout this Ajax tutorial, we’ll look at how this procedure is used in numerous scripts to achieve a range of effects.

1. Login Forms

Instead than going to a login page and then returning to the original website, users can type their user name and password straight into the original page using AJAX. AJAX will then send a request to the server for them to log in. The server informs the website that the user has signed in, allowing the page to update as needed.

2. Auto-Complete

Google was one of the first large corporations to adopt AJAX, and their search suggestion tool was one of the first use of the technology, as well as one of the first auto-complete tools. When you start typing into the Google search bar, it uses AJAX to pull common results from the database with each keystroke. For forms with a large number of possible inputs, Auto-Complete is ideal because a choose drop down would be too long and inconvenient.

3. Voting and Rating

Users pick the major material of social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Reddit by voting on content that they like. They use AJAX to handle all of the voting so that people can quickly and simply express their thoughts on a variety of stories.

4. Updating With User Content

One of the factors that contributed to Twitter’s success was its user-friendly interface. When someone ‘tweets,’ it is automatically added to their feed and everything is updated. Twitter has began using AJAX on their ‘trending topics’ displays. The page updates the user every few seconds with new tweets about the topic, giving them up-to-the-minute information.

5. Form Submission & Validation

Forms have always been difficult to work with, but AJAX can greatly improve the user experience. AJAX can be used in a variety of ways, including the autocomplete feature stated earlier, as well as validation and submission. AJAX is used by some websites to determine whether a form meets certain criteria, such as password strength or whether something is a genuine email or URL.

6. Chat Rooms And Instant Messaging

Since the days of IRC, internet chat has gone a long way. Chat rooms and instant messaging can now be completed entirely within the browser. In a chat room or IM programme, there are two major AJAX operations. Consider one of them to be your ears, and the other to be your mouth. Your’mouth’ updates the server and informs it that a message has been sent. The ‘ears’ are constantly checking with the server and updating your page with messages sent by anybody you’re conversing with.

7. Slicker UIs

AJAX is frequently used to create a clean, smooth user experience. It enables consumers to get more done on a single page. There are two advantages to this: It does two things: one, it makes utilising the web application faster and easier for the user; second, it reduces the amount of requests you must make to the server, which reduces bandwidth and load times. Drop.io, a free file upload service, makes good use of this. Google has also pushed the boundaries of what AJAX can do by creating desktop-like programmes like Google Docs and Google Maps.

8. External Widgets

When using AJAX, the page that uses JavaScript is not restricted to the server on which it is hosted. AJAX can communicate with any online server. This is how many plug-ins for Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, as well as other scripts like Google Adsense, function.

9. Lightboxes instead of pop-ups

Pop-up blockers are all the rage these days, and for good reason: they’re annoying. The pop-up blocker won’t stop light boxes, which are pop-ups inside the browser window, and they aren’t as annoying to the user. They can also be used as a login or registration box, as Reddit does when you attempt to vote but are not logged in.

10. Using AJAX With Flash

Although combining AJAX with Flash is an infrequently utilised method, it can provide some spectacular outcomes. Kongregate, a flash game website, makes excellent use of this. They have their own award system that entails winning ‘badges’ for fulfilling specific achievements in games using their API. When a badge is earned, the Flash API sends a response to JavaScript, which then updates the user’s profile with the freshly obtained award using AJAX.

I hope that this Ajax tutorial has inspired you to think about how you can utilise AJAX to enhance and expand your online apps.