There are a few different ways to get started with AJAX. If you are already familiar with a web technology such as ASP.NET, there is a bundled “toolkit” that is free and will make it easy to integrate AJAX into your websites. If you want to explore AJAX and ASP.NET together, we highly recommend starting there.

You can also work with AJAX manually, independent of anything except HTML. We don’t recommend this if you don’t have a good working familiarity with JavaScript, already, however. After all, AJAX really is an asynchronous bundling of advanced JavaScript with XML. If you’re curious about what some code using AJAX technologies might look like, here’s some JavaScript from the Mozilla Developer Center that creates an HTTP web request, a simplified form of an XML Web Request that forms the basis of AJAX:

var httpRequest;

if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // Mozilla, Safari, ...

    httpRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();

} else if (window.ActiveXObject) { // IE

    httpRequest = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");

}

If you’re interested in learning how to harness AJAX independent of another technology like PHP or ASP.NET, there are good resources to help you. If you’d like to use AJAX to enhance interactivity created with another technology, we recommend working with the AJAX kits provided by those technologies. We’ve found that the AJAX integration with ASP.NET is much more substantial than the integration with PHP, but we’ve included overview links for both technologies, as well as two links for AJAX independent of those technologies, below.