AJAX and REST

I first read about AJAX on Danny's site. I thought it was some kind of server-side add-on module, but actually AJAX is technique for doing Web development that improves a page's interactivity without doing page loads. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML and you can read all about it here. The concept is quite interesting. Basically, parts of the HTML on a page is generated dynamically with Javascript, using XML data retrieved from the server via an XMLHttpRequest object. And since the data exchange is asychronous, the whole page does not need to load.

So this AJAX stuff is cool but how to get my hands into it you ask? Well, one of the things you can do is add a Google quick search to your site. Yes, that's right, Google has an AJAX Search API, and I am quite impressed with how easy it was to incorporate into my home page.

Speaking of web development, I was suprised to find that YouTube has a REST API for retrieving videos from their site. REST is only a concept I've heard about from my manager once, this is the first time I encountered a real world application of it (but as it turns out, many sites such as Amazon and eBay have REST APIs too, I just don't know about them). REST is certainly a topic I would like to learn about. Furthermore, it sounds like AJAX and REST goes hand in hand together.