The unspoken beauty of running a website is the power it gives you. The power to provoke a thought or initiate change or maybe just give you a peace of mind. Blogging has made this ever-so possible with unbelievable ease.
You can make your website heart-felt or winter-cold all depending on your choice of visual themes, images and user interactivity.
Different website, needs different approaches when it comes to visuals but nothing says “Leave My Site” like a boring static website that has blocks of information. So, Why not spice it up a little bit?
What is Ajax?
Ajax or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a collective group of web techniques, brought together for one single purpose — to create interactive web applications. Your visitors will be much more involved with the help from some of these scripts as they range from Web 2.0 Contact forms to detail statistics.
The language found it’s feet back in 2005, but the basic fundamentals were roaming the internet as way back as the 1990s. It was only recently, that it was distinguished as a solid form of web-scripting.
Is it a language, like Javascript?
You could call it a language, but it derives from a combination of other languages. The word “Ajax” originates from a web-developer’s creativity by the name of Jesse James Garrett. Mr. Garret engagingly explained that the language refers specifically to (Quoted from Wikipedia) -
- XHTML and CSS for presentation
- the Document Object Model for dynamic display of and interaction with data
- XML and XSLT for the interchange, manipulation and display of data, respectively
- the XMLHttpRequest object for asynchronous communication
- JavaScript to finally wrap all these codes together
Since then, many die-hard fans of scripting have played around with it’s potential and produced some of the best scripts we have on the internet today!
Here’s a great list of Ajax Scripts that I’ve used myself in the past. The list has 59 Amazingly Free Ajax Scripts, but it’s only the tip of the ice-berg. A simple Google Search will return millions upon millions of results!
59 Awesome Ajax Scripts, Starts NOW!
Courtesy of Miniajax
GreyBox: An easy javascript popup box
Ajax subscription box — Mailist 0.9
Googlemap with geocode support
Browser-based instant messaging client
Gmail style, AJAX check username signup
ActiveCollab — open source project planner
Unobtrusive table sort scriptdemo
Really Easy Field validation with Prototype
ModalBox 1.5 — User friendly web-based
ThickBox 2.1.1 — a webpage UI dialog widget
An Ajax file uploads progress bar
JonDesign’s SmoothGallerydemo
Sortable, resizable, editable tables
TJPzoom — JS / CSS / DOM image magnifier
Have you tried any of these before?
Do you have an AJAX Script that you’ve made?
Why not leave a comment and tell us all about it!
12 Discussions
Amazing collection Janith I hope this helps some people, AJAX does some really cool stuff.
Whoa! Awesome compilation….quite a long post
I had never actually bothered to know AJAX’s full form.
*Why don’t you’ll add the sociable plugin? It rocks and is super convenient*
Awesome list Janith,
I’d love to see some WordPress Ajax plugins too.
P.S.
I think the “Browser-based instant messaging client” has moved to http://www.ajaxim.com/
@Farrhad: I have never really messed around with AJAX either. I know it can do amazing things, I just never really got into it.
PS – ShareThis > Sociable :p
@Patrick: Thanks for pointing that out. I have fixed it.
Woah, nice list!
There’s heaps of nice Ajax Scripts but these are some of the best ~ will implement a few soon.
Thanks
SERPGenius
Awesme List
I hv been looking 2 remake some navigation…. So nw this wll mke it work a lottt easier.
Thanks 4 sharing
Thats huge list!!! Good work janith !!
Absolutely cool AJAX scripts collection.
I have bookmarked it for my future projects.
The main part of AJAX is only XMLHttpRequest object, which have capability to load server side script (php, asp, etc) without need to load the entire page.
From my point of view, AJAX is just a javascript library, not the language itself. The things that made all the script above developed is the wide implementation of javascript and css. AJAX is just to load and execute the server side script (interact with database, etc). You can find the complete tutorial about AJAX at http://www.w3schools.com/Ajax/Default.Asp . But, if you would like to develop the script like above, you need to learn javascript and css entirely.
Thanks for the listing above.
Thank you for that tip Izwann,
I can’t believe I missed that tutorial posted by W3Schools – will definitely check it out!
I love your wordpress blog theme. Which one is it using. Can you point the url to me… and great work with the ajax scripts collection.
Hey Bill,
Thank you for the compliments but this isn’t a free nor commercial theme.
Mr. Alex Fraiser has custom-built this theme only got Blogussion!
He’s offering several services for WP-Theme building, which you can view here.
Alex knows what he’s doing and I’m sure he can work something out for you