The definition of AJAX has now however been expanded to include scripting languages other than JavaScript, and other ways of serializing data than XML. In-fact an application need not even be ...

AJAX stands for 'Asynchronous Javascript and XML' (Javascript and XML will appear in later posts in this series). You don't really need to know what AJAX stands for, what you do need to know is ...

Fundamentally, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) enables back-channel communication in Web applications so that only small portions of Web pages need to be updated in response to user activity.

If you've used Google Maps, Gmail or Microsoft's Outlook Web Access, you're familiar with the power of AJAX, which gives Web applications the responsiveness users associate with desktop applications.