Adam Bosworth on „Ajax reconsidered“.
He outlines: „In fact, I’ve written about all these outages before (see Evolution in Action), but in the context of the current excitement around Ajax, it seems reasonable to describe not only what is different and making it work, but what is still missing.“
Is it a hype? What about iframes („blind“ iframes for the communication channel between the client and the server) in favour of XmlHttpRequest technology?
XMLHttpRequest is more powerful because it provides details about the transfer. You can easily make POST requests, monitor progress, and set and examine headers (both request and response). I admit that they’re not useful for for everything, but they can come in handy.
Yes, but as Björn wrote in another entry (http://blog.thinkphp.de/archives/43-AJAX-redesign-your-PHP-applications.html) XMLHTTPRequest might not work everywhere. For example at our customer’s office I can’t use it since the companie’s firewall replaces every ActiveX-Call by „NULL“ so anybody in this network can’t use XMLHTTPRequest since IE is the only allowed browser and I’m sure this isn’t the only company with such filtering rules.