Summary

It will hopefully have become clear, in the course of this lesson and Lesson 12, that Ajax can achieve a lot of functionality without using any XML at all.

By carefully using combinations of client-side coding in JavaScript and server-side scripting in your chosen language, you can create data schemes of high complexity.

In simpler applications, where all you want to do is update the text of page elements, the XMLHTTPRequest object's functionality may be abstracted into a JavaScript function library and called from an HTML page via straightforward methods.

For some tasks, however, you need to leverage the power of XML. We'll look at this subject in Lesson 14, "Returning Data as XML."