As you learned in the preceding chapters, if you want to have an efficient PHP/Oracle application, you have to think about how to effectively distribute the application processing between the web/PHP server and the Oracle database server and try to find some optimal balance point.
However, besides the web/PHP server and the Oracle database server, there may be another player in the field of application processing, namely the browser. With the help of browser-side technologies such as JavaScript and AJAX—an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML—you might achieve better performance by moving some application processing from the above-mentioned servers to the browser. More importantly though, using these technologies allows you to update the content viewed by the user in the browser without reloading the entire page, thus producing more responsive solutions.
This chapter explains how AJAX and some other client-side (browser-side) JavaScript technologies...