Once upon a time there was XMLHttpRequest. It was firstly invented by Microsoft, but very quickly became popular and other big companies like Google and Mozilla also adopted it. Now it is a W3C standard and all (relatively new) browsers support it. The idea behind XMLHttpRequest is to do a request to a server without doing a full page load. This can enable small portions of the HTML page to be updated dynamically and lead to better user experience. Furthermore, the term AJAX appeared, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (note, there are some discussions whether the X stands for XML or XMLHttpRequest, but this is outside the scope of this post). Although AJAX was initially meant for XML communication, it can be used for other data types, f.x. JSON). Continue Reading…