Over the past year, AJAX technology has allowed us to provide a more fluid and friendly user experience in our web applications.

In the past, communicating with a web server meant sending a request and waiting for a response before the user could interact with the page. AJAX allows us to communicate with a web server without refreshing the page, and thus without stopping the user experience.

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a combination of web technologies, at the core of which is the JavaScript object XMLHttpRequest. We have focused our AJAX implementation around Microsoft's feature-rich framework, which provides the most flexibility. 

With AJAX, we can select which data is sent back to the server, making our web applications more efficient, and in turn improving the responsiveness and interactivity of our websites.