AJAX benefits

Michael Schwarz on Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Labels

I get a lot of feedback by email and comments on my blog. Sorry, if I cannot answer all that fast.

A lot of developers are asking me what are the benefits using the AJAX .NET Wrapper DLL or simply AJAX (XmlHttpRequest and Javascript). Long time ago I had to build an application (intranet) that was running in Internet Explorer, but no use of a web server. The data access has be done using COM/DCOM objects and XML to be transformed with XSL to HTML. The complete application was only using static HTML files but dynamic pages (like monitor machines running,...). Later we decided to migrate the application to ASP.NET web application. With C# and the Just-in-Time complier we thought it would be more faster. But this was wrong. Only with the right use of Javascript we could make the same speed as we had done with the old version.

What are the benefits of using AJAX?

There will be no postback to the server that will render the complete page. If you display a big table with a lot of data inside (CSS, HTML,...) the page may be about 80 kB. This big "string" must be created on the server and must be send to client also. With AJAX only the new data will be transmitted, you will save CPU usage on the web server, you will save network traffic (i.e. using slow modem connections or mobile phones/GPRS).

With the AJAX .NET Wrapper DLL you will save time develop such methods. You can simply add new methods to be exported (on thy fly).

See also: http://dotnet.org.za/armand/archive/2005/04/12/16934.aspx [1]