I just started studying Ajax and I totally have not idea what AJAX is. What is the difference between asynchronous and synchronous request? I would like to seek a very simple example demonstrating their differences.
AJAX short for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML is a programming language. It typically involves sending HTTP requests from client to server and processing the server's response, without reloading the entire page. This process is asynchronous. Comparing to synchronous request which blocks the client until operation completes, asynchronous HTTP is more efficient and user-friendly.
Take very simple example, when you are signing up on a commercial website, you can know whether your username is available or not once you finish typing the name. If the username was used already, the website will give you a reminder that your username is used on the same web page. This is the application of AJAX, so you don't need to complete the whole form and click the submit button to know that your username is not available.
AJAX uses two components for request process and display:
A browser built-in XMLHttpRequest object (to request data from a web server)
JavaScript and HTML DOM (to display or use the data)
It begins with an event occurs in a web page, such as a button is clicked. Then an XMLHttpRequest object is created by JavaScript, followed by sending a request to a web server. Once the web server receives the request, it will process it and send a response back to the web page. Then the webpage utilizes JavaScript to perform update of the web page without reloading the whole page.
AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML
Ajax main purpose is the loading data from the server without refreshing the web page
It's works in the background thread without interrupting UI thread
AJAX allows web pages to be updated asynchronously by exchanging data with a web server behind the scenes. This means that it is possible to update parts of a web page, without reloading the whole page.
A browser built-in XMLHttpRequest object which is used to request data from a web server
Example
when you are filling any kind of online form that time observe one thing there is option for country,state,district.
In this country drop down initially filled with data but state and district's are empty.
when you select a country like India then Asynchronous call goes to server and fetch the data of state drop down respective to selected country and so on.
when AJAX request fetching the data for the state drop down you are eligible to work with other parts of the form.
Related
I work at an analytics vendor and we're looking into supporting AMP. I'm looking into beaconing data using amp-analytics. I've got the default trackPageView working from the example in the docs. I get a POST request sent to my server when the page is loaded.
However, one of our use cases is sending a beacon after an AJAX request has completed on the page. The idea is that our customer performs an AJAX request to one of our APIs and gets back some data. Some of that data is used to add elements to the DOM and some of that data is sent back to us which acts as a beacon type in our system. One thing I thought of was since that second piece of data is coming from us and then being sent back to us, we could just send it between our services internally and not have the browser need to send it to us at all, but there are a few issues that prevent us from doing this:
The API in question is high traffic and has caching implemented. There are many more requests being made by browsers than being received by our API's server, and we want to track them all.
We also want to track data such as browser user agent, so we need that request to be sent by the browser, not our API server.
I have a few challenges here with implementing this in AMP:
The AJAX request would be performed by an amp-script element that our customer would put together. Since amp-scripts are very sandboxed, would this cause issues having the contents of an amp-script interact with the AMP runtime?
I don't see any triggers in AMP docs that I could use to have the amp-analytics request sent when the AJAX request completes.
Usually the questions I put together on StackOverflow are more direct, but I'm mostly confused right now on how to implement this with AMP or whether it's even possible to implement it with AMP at all.
Is there a way that a MVC Action, initiated by an AJAX request, can redirect the response directly to another page/View without sending a JavaScript “window.location=…” to the client first? In other words, directly transferring the response on the server side and avoiding the roundtrip to the client.
This is a more general question about the possibility to transfer directly an AJAX call, but here is a more specific scenario:
The browser sends an AJAX request to the server and based on the request data the controller's logic performs some operations.
For the majority of the cases, the controller needs to return back a result (JSON) to the same page. However, for few cases it needs to redirect to another page and it returns back a script to redirect the page, but this causes another roundtrip to the browser. The flow is: Page – Server – Page – Server – New Page, and the question is if this can be optimized to Page – Server – New Page .
This isn't really possible, no.
The browser has two options to choose between:
Go to a page
Make an AJAX call to a page
It can't make an AJAX call and automatically redirect based on what the server decides because the client (browser) doesn't know what the server has decided on before the response is even received by the browser.
The traditional approach (which you're avoiding) is:
The browser makes an asynchronous request to the server
The server responds with data informing the client to redirect
The client makes a new request to the server via window.location
The server responds with the new page
However you want to skip a step by doing:
The browser makes an asynchronous request to the server
The client makes a new request to the server via window.location
The server responds with the new page
But the client doesn't know that it needs to redirect and/or it doesn't know how to.
One (ugly) possibility
One idea that comes to mind to pseudo-achieve what you want is to have MVC render the required view and send the whole thing back to the client via JSON rather than a redirection approach. Let me explain.
The browser makes an asynchronous request to the server
The server determines which page needs to be displayed and renders the view (Generating a view without a controller in MVC)
The server serialises the resulting HTML as JSON
The client receives the JSON, and re-renders the entire page with the new markup (i.e. completely replace)
You can also alter the URL and history of the browser to make it "feel" like a redirect by manipulating the browser history.
However I would like to point out that this "solution" is more of an amusing/interesting approach. This isn't really a good way to go about the problem.
I'm using a website, abc.com, that is hosting an iframe of a page on 123.com.
The page inside the iframe is doing an AJAX request to another page on 123.com, but we're seeing that the request is getting cancelled.
Unless I'm wrong — and I haven't found any official information on the internet about this — the call should work fine as it is not a cross-domain request.
Would the fact that the parent frame is on a different domain really hinder the iframe from doing AJAX requests to its own server?
The IFRAME should be able to make an ajax request to its own originating site (same source URL). However, make sure the REQUEST event is FIRED from the IFRAME, not the parent.
My first guess would be you are loading the IFRAME and then addressing it (firing an event) via the parent (JS) to get it to do/get/set something which triggers an ajax call. In short, this is the mostly likely reason the IFRAME domain to same domain request is getting cancelled as it is still recognized by the browser as originating from outside the target domain code.
The REQUEST event needs to be organically generated from the user clicking on something in the IFRAME or from code in the IFRAME itself firing the event.
In other words: just because the IFRAME may have some ability to fire events/ajax in its JS/code to/from itself, it would normally still not be allowed to have the parent reference that ajax/JS directly via JS/code. The IFRAME has to already be coded to do it based on its load parameters (URL values, perhaps) or the user has to physically click/take action on something to create a user generated event on that domain.
Of course, this is going to vary a bit by browser and version on what you might be able coax in terms interactivity between the parent and iframe. But a strict, up-to-date browser will try to keep you from faking insecure interaction on the iFrame via js.
To get a better answer, you would need to provide more detail on exactly what you are doing/getting.
I just want to know what is the difference between sending parameter with ajax(post/get) to a servlet and sending them with "submit" .
Thanks for your help.
A standard form submit sends a new HTTP request (POST or GET) and loads the new page in the browser. In Ajax, the data is sent to the server (POST or GET) in the background, without affecting the page at all, and the response is then received by javascript in the background, again without affecting the page at all.
(The javascript can, of course, then use the data received from the server to update some of the page content.)
Ajax is generally useful where only a small section of the page content will change.
At the simplest, with ajax, you don't witness page refresh while submitting form data. And if you don't use it eg you use submit buttons, you witness page refresh. Both submit the data.
Server side handling of both are exactly the same. The server is not concerned about how the post request is made.
The difference is in how the browser (client side) responds to both the actions. The browser usually decides to make a request for an entire page if it is a form submit; otherwise, it just updates a part of the page.
From the servlet's point of view there is no difference. For the client, a submit will load a new page, while an Ajax request will parse the response with javascript code and act accordingly.
The form submit will reload the page that you are working on client side.,while in ajax call the call was made to server will not reload your client side page
I'm been reading up on Ajax and would like to see from the stackoverflow community if I'm understanding everything correctly.
So the normal client server interaction is a user pulls up a web browser types in a url and a HTTP request is sent to the server requesting the page and resources( css, pics ) from the web server. The web server responds to the client via HTTP the page/resources requested and the browser renders the html/JavaScript for the user to view the page.
1) So would it be safe to say that XMLHttpRequest( XHR ) object is doing the same process as the browser except your not requesting html from the server, your requesting text in some type of format?
2) Is it true that a XHR object is much like a regular object that can be manipulated by the program creating the object( like a normal object ), but also sends and receives data with another program( web server ) via HTTP?
3) So in my mind when a XHR is created it is loaded into memory and we setup some of the objects arguments when we do the request.open(“GET”, url, true). Once we do a request.send(null) the object basically attempts to “GET” the url via HTTP and once we get the data back from the server it is put in the responseText argument. Am I understanding this correctly?
4) Also synchronous vs asynchronous. When I think of synchronous I think of steps having to be followed in order. For example, I push a button, data gets sent to server, and I have to wait for data to come back before I can do anything else. With asynchronous connections I would push button, data gets sent to server, I do what ever I want while data gets sent back. Is this a good analogy?
1) Nope. The XMLHttpRequest object does exactly what its name implies -- it initiates an HTTP request. This request can be in XML, or HTML, or PHP. At the end of the day, the browser doesn't care, because in an AJAX request, it doesn't parse the request -- you have to do it yourself. So it doesn't automatically render the HTML from an AJAX request.
2) I'm not sure about manipulation (the XHR object may be immutable) but possibly. Would you ever need to extend it or manipulate it?
Yes, you can change properties of the object and so on. I apologize. I didn't understand you at first :)
3) Yep.
4) That's a great analogy. It's exactly what happens. Another analogy is a 4 lane highway is to asynchronous as a one-way street is to synchronous. If one car breaks down on the 4 lane highway, the rest can keep moving at their normal speed -- but if one breaks down on the one-way road, everything freezes. :)
Here I leave you a good graphic to see clearly the behavior differences between the synchronous and asynchronous application models:
(source: adaptivepath.com)
It would appear that you have a job grasp of how AJAX works. I can't see much to disagree with in your summary of the plumbing of an AJAX application.
I would say however that with the XMLHttpRequest object you aren't restricted to GET. You can also use POST and other HTTP verbs.
With async calls you register a callback function, the XMLHttpRequest object calls your method when the async request completes.
Seems ok to me.
Your first point though is not entirely correct, you can request html from the server using ajax is doesn't have to text, json or xml like most examples show.