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It depends. Clearly the 'X' in AJAX stands for XML, but several AJAX proponents
are quick to point out that nothing in AJAX, per se, precludes using other
types of payload, such as, JavaScript, HTML, or plain text. * XML - Web
Services and AJAX seem made for one another. You can use client-side API's for
downloading and parsing the XML content from RESTful Web Services. (However be
mindful with some SOAP based Web Services architectures the payloads can get
quite large and complex, and therefore may be inappropriate with AJAX
techniqes.) * Plain Text - In this case server-generated text may be injected
into a document or evaluated by client-side logic. * JavaScript - This is an
extension to the plain text case with the exception that a server-side
component passes a fragment of JavaScript including JavaScript object
declarations. Using the JavaScript eval() function you can then create the
objects on the client. JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), which is a JavaScript
object based data exchange specification, relies on this technique. * HTML -
Injecting server-generated HTML fragments directly into a document is generally
a very effective AJAX technique. However, it can be complicated keeping the
server-side component in sync with what is displayed on the client. Mashup is a
popular term for creating a completely new web application by combining the
content from disparate Web Services and other online API's. A good example of a
mashup is housingmaps.com which graphically combines housing want-ads from
craiglist.org and maps from maps.google.com.
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