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The Value of Ajax By Anthony Garritano Ajax is a name mortgage technology users should become familiar with. We're not talking about the household cleaner. Rather, Ajax is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is a Web development technique for creating interactive applications. The intent is to make webpages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire webpage does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is meant to increase the webpage's interactivity, speed, and usability. The Ajax technique uses a combination of XHTML (or HTML) and CSS, for marking up and styling information; DOM accessed with a client-side scripting language, especially ECMAScript implementations such as JavaScript and JScript, to dynamically display and interact with the information presented; and a XMLHttpRequest object is used to exchange data asynchronously with the Web server. In some Ajax frameworks and in certain situations, an IFrame object is used instead of the XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data with the server, and in other implementations, dynamically added script tags may be used. XML is sometimes used as the format for transferring data between the server and client, although any format will work, including preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON and even EBML. These files may be created dynamically by some form of server-side scripting. For the broker this means easier use of technologies that have Ajax at their core. At present companies like Leads 360 are embracing the technology with a lot of success. "We started working on implementing Ajax nine months ago," reported Jeff Solomon, CEO of Leads 360. "It was tricky and there were some hurdles to overcome. We started using it in administrative areas first. From there we spread it to other parts of the system. "Ajax increases the performance for the customer. There's a lot of refreshing and data going back and forth. Performance is always an issue. Our clients are always asking us to go faster," he said. "Second, Ajax decreases our bandwidth. We can decrease the amount of data going back and forth by 15%. When we're completely Ajax we expect a 30% decrease. In addition, it looks cool," noted Mr. Solomon. "There's an icon that comes up and bam all the data is there. It makes a Web-based product more comparable to desktop applications. "From the administrator side a lot of our clients that do configuration changes like it," he concluded. "For those that are constantly changing their status and workflow, they think it's great. Most Web-based software will be adding Ajax over time. We're just leading the charge."

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