AJAX Workflow

Kontinuum 2006a version and later use AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) in both the design suite and end user environment. AJAX allows users to complete forms in a more dynamic fashion. With AJAX a complete HTML request and response is not required so that the forms behave more like the forms in windows applications instead of web pages. AJAX Webforms allow things like default values to be calculating, hiding and showing different questions, and cascading list boxes to be drawn without a full form refresh.

All this contributes to users being able to fill in forms faster and with better data.

Wikipedia Definition of AJAX

Ajax, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability.

The Ajax technique uses a combination of:

XHTML (or HTML) and CSS, for marking up and styling information.

The DOM accessed with a client-side scripting language, especially ECMAScript implementations such as JavaScript and JScript, to dynamically display and interact with the information presented.

The XMLHttpRequest object is used to exchange data asynchronously with the web server. In some Ajax frameworks and in certain situations, an IFrame object is used instead of the XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data with the web server, and in other implementations, dynamically added script tags may be used.