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Here are the main concepts that you will work with and that need to be very clear in your mind:
AJAX is a mix of several popular technologies put together to build a friendlier web. This acronym stands for Asynchronous JAvaScript and XML (the full name already contains two technologies and a technique for loading information). For a complete definition of AJAX, click here.
An AJAX-based site is a site built entirely with AJAX panels.
Because the website is AJAX-enabled, when visitors click a link or submit some information, only certain areas of the page change. That is why they will perceive the site as having a single page, that changes regions of content, depending on user interaction. These regions or areas of a page, that change asynchronously and independently from other similar regions, are called AJAX Panels.
An AJAX panel is a region/area/box/part of a page that changes its content independently from the rest of the page. The changes are triggered by interactions with the user. These variations are called states. A panel can have one or more states. All panels have a default state, that is displayed when the page first loads.
The main panel is the one that sets the HTML title in your site (depending on its currently displayed state). For each of its states, you can specify the meta description and the list of meta keywords.
One of the pieces of content that loads in a particular AJAX panel, when the user performs an action.
Degradation of a system in such a manner that it continues to operate, but provides a reduced level of service rather than failing completely.
In the case of AJAX, it means that a gracefully degradable applications will continue to work "as expected" even when JavaScript is disabled.
In the MX AJAX Toolbox context, an effect expresses the way a panel state is loaded (the fade style, for example).