Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Ajax Case Study: Personal Touches on the User Experience

Since 2005, the term AJAX has become a norm for web developers and designers alike. What many may confuse for a new language is actually a bag of tricks many developers and web hackers have been utilizing for a few years now. I too found a bold interest when Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path first spoke about AJAX a few years ago in his article AJAX - A New Approach to Web Applications. It suddenly put into perspective a lot of mumbo jumbo my professors were ranting about.

Now, two years later I have the great opportunity of applying these techniques to some of the web applications that I am developing for ResultsTel Inc, a telecommunications company that I proudly work for. I have the great privilege of working with a genius developer in a data driven company. When you work for a data driven company, you will always need a quick and effective method to pull the data that is requested at any given time. This is where we, the developers at Results come into play. The applications that we develop are geared toward who exactly will be requesting specific queries from the database. Each one is very different in form, look, and feel. AJAX is the common ground though, allowing many techniques to join binary hands to create an open gate for users to obtain the essential elements that their success depends upon.