Tag Archives: XMLHttp

Why no AJAX?

I was viewing the score for the cricket match between India and England from Yahoo! India Cricket portal. The problem being a web programmer is that you always tend to look at each web page from the development perspective and something grabbed my attention. The web page was refreshing every 60 seconds to get the latest score and a new request/response is generated every time. (Ok so have you got what I was thinking about?) Why are they not using AJAX to refresh the scores rather than refreshing the whole page every time?

The web developer inside me got out and I immediately checked the other sites which are also offering the cricket scores. I checked Sify and Rediff. Even they are not using AJAX and are refreshing the whole page every time. But the refreshing interval was different. Here is the refreshing interval which I got by looking at their META tag.

Rediff 480 seconds
Yahoo India 60 seconds
Sify 60 seconds

The obvious advantage in using the AJAX approach (XMLHTTP) is that the amount of data that is going to get transferred from the server is going to be less and it’s going to save the bandwidth by leaps and bounds.

I would be really happy if any one from either Sify or Rediff or Yahoo! India reads this and just gives a thought about it. And do any of you guys know how to get the raw data about the scores and the license requirement (if available). I am thinking of giving it a try and build a POC (Proof of Concept) app, if the data is available.

Oops!, by the time I could compose this post, the match has been stopped due to rain 🙁

Posted in JavaScript/jQuery | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

AJAX Library

Regular readers of my blog would have noticed that off late, I am not updating the blog much. The reason for that is, first work is taking most of my time, second I am working on a small pet project, more on it later 😉 so as to get my hands dirty with AJAX.

I was googling around to find out a good library for AJAX, so that I can start with it. And I came across Backbase. It looked very promising, so I downloaded the community edition and started working with it. But I felt it is very complex and I am not sure whether it is worth the effort and moreover I am worried about the lincening too.

So people I need some help from you. Can you suggest/recommend or point me to some good library for implementing AJAX into web applications. I am particularly interested in libraries which work (at least decently) across platforms. So guys I am waiting for your replies.

PS: I have already written a small wrapper function for XMLHttp object, which works in the latest version of both IE and Firefox. I will post it once I finish testing it. Meanwhile if any of you want to have a look at it, just leave a comment or mail me.

Posted in JavaScript/jQuery | Tagged , , | 5 Comments