Joy's Blog

I found this article about how to speed up your ajax application with Ajax. Here it is!

Speed is everything when it comes to online applications. Users hate to sit and wait, especially the experienced ones. A few seconds pass and they start to think something’s broken. Knowing this, optimizing everything you can on your application can mean the difference between someone leaving or sticking around to explore the site more. One method for enhancing the speed in your app is described here on Builder.com - using JSON to speed up your Ajax script’s connection between it and the server.

XML is the standard way to interchange data, but it’s often not the best way. Although XML can add structure and metadata to data, it does so in an overly verbose way. XML also has a fairly complex syntax, requiring a non-trivial parser to attack it. In JavaScript, XML must be parsed into a DOM tree to be used. And, once you’ve constructed the DOM tree, you still have to pilot through it to create corresponding JavaScript objects or otherwise use the XML data in your client-side Web application.

The article introduces JSON to the reader, offering a comparison with a matching XML structure. Their point of view is that XML is great for marking up data, but JSON is meant for the speed of data exchange. There’s an example provided of the difference between the same request done in both XML and JSON, with the JSON seeming to be the simpler. The article finished off with a look at how reliable JSON is for your application, and some mention of life on the other side - the server-side functionality.