The AJAX example below shows how a web page can communicate with a web server online as a user enters data into a standard HTML form:
Other AJAX examples include
Google Suggest:
Watch the way the suggested terms update as you type, almost instantly.
Google Maps:
Use your cursor to grab the map and scroll around a bit.
Again, everything happens almost instantly.
The biggest challenges in creating AJAX applications are not technical.
The core AJAX technologies are mature, stable, and well understood.
Instead, the challenges are for the designers of these applications:
To forget what we think we know about the limitations of the Web, and begin to imagine a wider, richer range of possibilities
The following video shows how to leverage ColdFusion data using AJAX with the functionality of ColdFusion 8.
It also demonstrates how to populate drop-down lists in an application with data from ColdFusion.