AJAX is a well-known acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. AJAX is not a single technology, but is a group of interrelated web development techniques used to create asynchronous web applications. With AJAX, web applications can send data to, and retrieve data from, the web server asynchronously without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page and in this way full page reloads are avoided.
In the diagram below, I present, by using UML diagrams, the Classic Web System Model and the AJAX Web System Model.
Like you can see from the diagrams above in the case of the classic model, for each user request from the User Interface component (from the Browser Client) is send an HTTP request directly to the Web Application (that runs on the Web Server), and the Web Application does some processing and sends back the response as an HTML page (HTTP + CSS) to the browser, and finally the browser renders the entire response.
In the case of AJAX based web applications, when the user requests, the User Interface component sends a JavaScript call to the AJAX Engine component of the browser. This engine is responsible for both rendering the interface the user sees and communicating with the server on the user’s behalf. The AJAX engine allows the user’s interaction with the application to happen asynchronously—independent of the communication with the server. Note that the AJAX Engine sends to the Web Application an HTTP request and receives back as response only the needed data (and not the entire HTML page) in XML format.
refer from : http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/594150/MVC-Basic-Site-Step-4-jqGrid-In