AJAX - Bringing Interactive Back to the Internet

by Dan Naden

In early 2007, BHI relaunched and revamped the premiere destination for new home seekers, NewHome Source.  The new and enhanced NewHomeSource.com is focused on three key benefits: convenience, interactivity, and immediacy.  We’ve dramatically increased the speed and ease of accessing information by providing new home seekers with a simple search and results interface, map view, and descriptive home/community details. 

The foundation for much of the new technology showcased on the newest version of NewHomeSource.com is the use of a Web development technique for building interactive Internet applications called AJAX.  AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, saves consumers’ precious time by returning information instantly without having to refresh the page.

To see AJAX in action on New Home Source, go to NewHomeSource.com and do the following:

1. Perform a new home search for Phoenix, Arizona.

2. Use the ‘Refine Your Search’ links to narrow your results by price, home size, home type, and more; notice how the results dynamically change, yet the page does not refresh.  This time-saving benefit is brought to you by AJAX technology.

3. In addition to the ‘Refine Your Search’ functionality, the new, interactive map brings the power of AJAX right to consumers.  In our Phoenix search, the entire Phoenix market is displayed on the map.  Consumers can now search and navigate (browse, click, zoom, pan) for communities.  A click on a community icon will provide valuable information about that community (community name, builder name, price range, number of matching homes, and the ability to request more information about the community).

For any Web site, the benefits of AJAX are wide-reaching:

• The first benefit of incorporating AJAX technology into a site would be an improved consumer experience.  Today’s busy consumer may not wait for your application to load a new Web page.  A slow consumer experience may equate to a lost consumer – not good for helping your business reach its goals.  In today’s ‘immediate’ society, your business should do everything it can to bring information to the masses as quickly as possible. The quick, speedy, interactive nature of AJAX technology can be your company’s means to that end.

• The second benefit will really make your IT department happy.  AJAX eliminates costly and wasteful bandwidth consumption that is typical of most calls to the web by generating most of its information within the browser.  Most user actions on Web applications today launch an HTTP request back to a Web server.  The server processes and then sends information back to the consumer in an HTML page.  Technically, this is spot-on, but there is nothing consumer-focused about waiting for a page to load with the information that you requested.  This would be like having to wait five seconds to see a new TV program when changing channels with your remote control.  When AJAX is implemented for a particular page on your Web site, interactions on the page happen without the burden of communications between browser client and server.  The AJAX engine, usually written in JavaScript, loads the interface and ‘talks’ to the server for the consumer.  The consumer is first in this equation, and that is a vital factor.

• There are plenty of upsides to putting AJAX in play on your Web site, but the fact is that the technology is very much in its infancy.  We can certainly expect wider adoption as the technology matures; the more sites that utilize the technology, the more ideas that can be leveraged into your site’s consumer experience.  The time to begin, however, is now, and there’s plenty of information available on how to get your site started down the AJAX path.  Sites like NewHomeSource.com have successfully incorporated AJAX technology into their site, providing a convenient, interactive, immediate experience.

Dan Naden is Product Manager of NewHome Source for BHI.  He can be reached at dnaden@builderhomesite.com.