Sorry, crap joke. But it´s a great technology! If you´ve never heard of it here´s a bit of background. It stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML (I think) and what it basically does is allow you to code pages so that they can communicate with a webserver to retrieve information without reloading the page.
You build in javascript functions into a page that use one of the "onEvent" functions in a link, form field or image (or whatever) to send a request to a webserver based on what the user is doing. The server then sends back data that you can then use to build html elements on the page without having to reload the page. This means that you can dynamically add information to a page based on the contents of a database without having to refresh or send out large amounts of information in the first place.
An example or two might help explain what I´m on about. A good one is http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en which uses an autocomplete feature quite nicely. There´s also Gmail (no, you can´t have my login details) which autocompletes email addresses and has a spell checker.
This technology isn´t new and has support from IE, Firefox and other major browsers so it´s definately worth looking into. I´ve got big plans for it for Eppointments. We could implement things like:
- Contact list editing without page refreshes
- Mobile phone number and email address autocomplete based on the users contact list
- Some kind of T9 dictionary for SMS messages
- Address completion based soley on postcode (obviously using a postcode database on the server
Time to do some research as I haven´t actually checked how easy this is to implement yet! More to follow