AJAX is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is a technology that is becoming increasingly popular as it provides meants to establish the communication in the background between a Web browser and a Web server.
AJAX permits executing actions and updating parts of Web pages without reloading the whole page.
Despite it has been introduced with Internet Explorer 5.5, only recently this technology has been implemented by Mozilla browsers and other browsers that followed the trend.
The wide adoption of AJAX opened space for applications and components that use AJAX to provide highly interactive Web based user interfaces.
This package is one of the three, released almost at the same time in August 2005, that provide means to facilitate the creation of PHP applications that take advantage of AJAX potential.
This class can be used to send HTTP requests to remote Web servers from Javascript code in Web pages without the need to reload such pages.
The class generates the necessary Javascript for performing the HTTP requests and handle the returned XML responses. It uses same technology behind Gmail and many other sites, that is also known as AJAX.