in page postbacks should die

[twinscythe12332]

after using AJAX for the past year or so, I've gotten used to seeing my pages update without having that wonderful screen flicker that happens. so I thought I'd see what everyone else feels about it.

[Dave A]

The trouble is AJAX is not always reliable. A single dropped packet and it grinds to halt.

And then every now and then an ISP decides not to carry Java based requests. Vodacom went through a run where they kept on "accidentally" disabling AJAX functionality whilst tweaking Java related security settings.

So for stability's sake I think we're stuck keeping a back-up system in place like form submissions, even if it is largely redundant.

[Marq]

I don't think that the majority of internet users even know what you are on about. There are so many bad sites out there never mind the ones that are well built just without ajax that most will not know or even see the difference. We probably see the difference due to our low speeds but overseas I wonder if one is really that aware.

If you are talking from a developers point of view, then could not agree with you more - its great to see your data come back in automatic type mode.

[Debbiedle]

Someone with time .....Please tell me what an in page post back is??

[twinscythe12332]

when you're on a normal page and click a button. what happens is it sends information to the server for processing and then reloads the page. let's, for example, say you have a grid of data. next to each row in that grid, there is a button that sets that certain row's text to a textbox below the grid. in a normal page, you will click the page, the page will disappear (normally a white screen) and then come back with your textbox updated. with asynchronous postback pages (ones that only reload the specific items), you will click and instead of reloading the entire page, it will just load the data into the textbox (along with any pageload stuff, but that's on developer side)

[Dave A]

An example of what AJAX can do is the quick reply function on this site. You type in the box, hit the post quick reply button and presto - without the whole page reloading.