Microsoft to Add AJAX Capabilities to ASP.NET

ver the past few months, there's been an increasing amount of buzz about Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) programming. It's about time. AJAX is the new term for a technology that Microsoft IE developers have been using for years—the ability to make background requests to a server from a client Web page using the XMLHttpRequest object. However, because that object was originally invented and implemented by Microsoft as an ActiveX control, developers who had to support multiple browser types eschewed the technology, despite its early promise for building more interactive and efficient Web applications.

But now that Opera, Netscape, Safari, and Firefox all include a built-in JavaScript implementation of the XMLHttpRequest object, the technology has been reinvigorated, thanks mainly to popular sites such as Google's GMail and Maps, which utilize the XMLHttpRequest object. Except for the code needed to invoke an XMLHttpRequest object on the various browsers, all the implementations are otherwise similar from a coder's point of view, exposing a common set of methods and properties, and letting you create AJAX applications that run identically across all the major browsers.