hi!!
AJAX or Asynchronous Javascript & XML seems to be the coolest or hottest (in whichever way u want) technology around. It deals with sending asynchronous requests to the server behind the scenes, and its a very good way of showing interactive content.
It comes with lot of advantages. One of them being; large data driven websites need not refresh whole pages of data always to display new content. Gmail is 1 of the many sites that uses AJAX heavily.
In .net, AJAX is implemented as "Atlas" and in J2EE, any app server that supports servlets will support AJAX.
To know more about it, follow the wikipedia link. Check out the Atlas link to know more about it in .net. As for J2EE, read this excellent article on implementing AJAX. As usual, there are some FAQs as well and some common pitfalls that you should avoid.
Happy coding bye!!~~
