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Concept
XMLHttpRequest
Summary
XMLHttpRequest (XHR) is a JavaScript class containing methods to asynchronously transmit HTTP requests from a web browser to a web server. The methods allow a browser-based application to make a fine-grained server call and store the results in XMLHttpRequest's responseText attribute. The XMLHttpRequest class is a component of Ajax programming. Prior to Ajax, an HTML form needed to be completely sent to the server followed by a complete browser page refresh.
The concept behind the XMLHttpRequest class was conceived in 2000 by the developers of Microsoft Outlook -- available on the Windows 2000 operating system. The concept was then implemented within the Internet Explorer 5 (2001) browser's interpreter. However, the original syntax did not use the XMLHttpRequest identifier. Instead, the developers used the identifiers ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP") and ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"). As of Internet Explorer 7 (2006), all browsers support the XMLHttpRequest identifier.
The XMLHttpRequest identifier is now the de facto standard in all the major browsers, including Mozilla's Gecko layout engine (2002), Konqueror (2002), Safari 1.2 (2004), Opera 8.0 (2005),, and iCab (2005).
With the advent of cross-browser JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, developers can invoke XMLHttpRequest functionality indirectly.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published a Working Draft specification for the XMLHttpRequest object on April 5, 2006. On February 25, 2008, the W3C published the Working Draft Level 2 specification. Level 2 added methods to monitor event progress, allow cross-site requests, and handle byte streams. At the end of 2011, the Level 2 specification was absorbed into the original specification.
At the end of 2012, the WHATWG took over development and maintains a living document using Web IDL.
Generating an asynchronous request to the web server requires first to instantiate (allocate the memory of) the XMLHttpRequest object. The allocated memory is assigned to a variable. The programming statement in JavaScript to instantiate a new object is new.
Official source
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