Is AJAX right for my project?
AJAX can be used to improve most parts of a web application. Before investing resources in AJAX development, take a moment and consider if this is the best solution for your clients – the visitors.
You can easily tell that you need AJAX if:
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The application you are building involves heavy server requests, with multiple web forms that submit data to the server. Corporate intranets with planning and meeting programming pages that use HTML forms in multiple steps benefit from this feature, as well as sites that allow users enter information and undergo heavy traffic.
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You want to display large amounts of data in a sequential manner without refreshing the entire page. In this category enter professional photo galleries, portal websites that aggregate data from a multitude of sources, in a variety of formats (news, blog feeds, directories, image feeds from a variety of sources).
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Users interact frequently with the application through forms to decide what to display, rather then submitting data.
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Application response time is a concern.
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Loading times have to be as short as possible.
Where not to use AJAX
Although you could use AJAX in almost any type of project, there are some situations where AJAX is neither necessary, nor useful:
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Plain, static HTML pages.
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The application must be accessed by older browsers or a very wide range of browser versions, and you cannot build an alternative system. Applications that are destined to be viewed by a large number of visitors, belonging to different categories in terms of browsers and platforms, sites that will be accessed by people with disabilities that use screen readers or other plain-text browsers.
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Users do not interact with the application on a frequent basis. Most presentation sites for small companies, public institutions, content repositories fall under this section.
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Loading times and bandwidth usage is not a primary concern. In this category fall sites that rely mostly on plain text content or do not have many graphics
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The application does not vary content very much, and dynamic loading of the information would not provide a significant improvement in the navigation experience.
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When the cost and time factors are paramount for the delivery of your project and your development team cannot afford to build a complex AJAX framework.
Of course, the final decision is up to you. In the next section, you will learn about some of the uses of AJAX in real-life applications.
