13th March 2006
Our first few systems with full-function AJAX administration areas have been launched with much success. The speed benefits of AJAX are simply staggering, which makes them particularly useful for frequently used systems such as extranets, intranets or administration areas.
What surprised us when we started building our own AJAX tools is that one of the simplest AJAX functions we’ve built has turned out to be the most powerful. We’ve built a function that simply grabs a HTML page from the web, and then drops the returned HTML into the inside of a container on the page - simple.
Before this AJAX function, if there was an area of a page that could be shown or hidden you would have two realistic choices. Firstly, you could use DHTML to show/hide it; which would mean the user needs to download all of the content whether they plan to show it or not. Doing it on the server side is the other option. The user will only need to download the content when they need it, but at the same time they will have to download the rest of the page a second time.
With our AJAX method, you can have areas within the page that are only downloaded when they are needed. These areas themselves can contain other areas that are downloaded when they are needed, and so on.
This has given huge speed benefits to our admin areas. When editing, for instance, a category within the admin area, the administrator can see the products within the category and to search within them. The administrator has the ability to run a complex, advanced search which can be quite a large form.
With the new AJAX administration areas, the administrator can be given the option to display the list of products only if they wish, and therefore only download it if they wish. If they want to run an advanced search, they can then download the form only if they need it.
OK, that’s just a simple table of products and a search form - not too much HTML. But some of our administration areas have more sub-elements. For instance, while looking at a user’s information within the admin area of an e-commerce site, you may need to see all of the purchases they have made, their registration information, the text they have submitted to forums, the returns they have made and potentially much more - AJAX saves a huge amount of overhead.