Introduction

Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) is a thin-client web-based application deployment technique, which utilises the web browser's ability to execute JavaScript code to generate and update the HTML user interface and synchronise the page data with the application server. This is in contrast with conventional thin-client deployment methods, where the application web server builds and delivers a complete HTML page to be rendered by the client browser each time the user clicks on the page. Therefore the load on the application server for Ajax applications is reduced, thus enabling significantly higher performance / load to be obtained from the same application web server. This benefit is maximised where a single web page performs many functions and requires many interactions with the user such as the complex (constraint based) user interface of product configuration applications.