AJAX and HTTP issues

Filed in archive AJAX on June 20, 2008

A number of developers have a notion that users are neither interested in saving web page nor losing network connectivity but they might be thinking in the wrong direction. One of the results of AJAX application is that they are dependant upon the existence of application server being available.

A number of web users feel that they have the freedom of saving web page which they can access at any given point of time. Various frameworks have come up recently which are aimed at tackling the offline scenario. The data is cached from the home server and in case offline changes are made the changes can be written to the home server when they become available but the back and forth requests to application generated by Ajax applications are not within its scope.

A number of developers try to make an effort to solve this problem by loading miniature application server on client via Java and it solves the problem initially too but after some point of time it might lose its purpose and the issue of saving web page remains unresolved.

From the user point of view they feel that they treat application like a webpage and users end up clicking the back button which ends up working like an undo button in a conventional step by step form based application. One of the issues addressed by AJAX in conventional web development is the stateless nature of HTTP protocol and it suffers from the same problem itself.

For overcoming this problem state could be tagged with hash code and redirecting the browser to the URL calling the hash code and when user hits the back button the user is directed to the earlier page rather than reaching the page at the beginning.

Thnx Justin