AJAX, although not a new technology, has ushered in an era of great activity in the web. Its freedom from being tied to any vendor, relative ease of use, increased user satisfaction contributes for its usage and popularity. Have a look at this tutorial at the W3C site to get an idea about how AJAX works. Successful web sites such as Google, Yahoo, eBay and others have made it all the more popular with their applications too numerous to list.

Ajax is tied in with RIA where the client is not a dummy, but an active participant. Dojo tool kit can be used to retrieve XML formatted information from a server. However other forms of formatting are also allowed such as HTML, JSON, and TEXT etc.