The main purpose of Ajax is to provide a simple and standard means for a web page to communicate with the server without a complete page refresh. To illustrate this, consider a simple registration form. You have very likely experienced the frustration of having to try multiple usernames when registering for some new website. You fill out the entire form, hit the submit button, wait for a second or so, and then get the same form right back with a message saying that the username you have chosen is not available. You try another easy-to-remember username and find it is also not available. You repeat this several times until finally you pick some obscure username. This process wouldn't be nearly as bad if you didn't have to wait for the entire page to refresh each time you tried a new username.   More detail...