The current trend with sophisticated web applications is to emulate desktop applications and veer away from the feel of a traditional website. With traditional websites, every interaction with the server requires a full-page postback that makes a complete round trip. As our web applications become more sophisticated, the need to send and retrieve data to and from the server increases.
If we rely on full-page postbacks every time, we need to facilitate one of these requests; our app will feel sluggish and unresponsive, as the user will have to wait for a full round trip with every request. Users demand more from their apps these days, and if you think about the application we've written, the Like button is a perfect example. Having to send a full-page postback to the server just because we wanted to increment a counter by one seems like a...
