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SwfJax is a Flash based approach to Ajax applications. It uses a lightweight SWF (Adobe’s Small Web Format) engine to get XML data from the server and xPath (XML Path Language) to address a part of data it has retrieved. Data can be returned to Javascript as an Array.
SwfJax is bundled with the latest version of Adobe’s “Flash / JavaScript Integration Kit”, or is available as a seperate component.
Update
As of 2007 SwfJax is no longer supported by the developers.
Criticism
Some people claim that using Flash to return XML to Javascript is overlooking the utility of the XMLHttpRequest functionality that is built-in to modern browsers. Additionally, the speed of passing from Flash to Javascript can be slow.
However one difference between these approaches may be that a Flash library using xPath may be closer to pure XML, if that is desired over more common Ajax data formats such as JSON or plain text.
One further criticism is that Flash is not supported by all web users, and thus any application that depends on SwfJax must neglect some portion of web users who do not have Flash.
