Mortgage calculators are a form of calculator that is often online and allows you to compute various details relating to mortgage payments and amortization. Such a calculator may take as inputs your mortgage rate and term as well as the principle balance an other related information. The calculator will then calculate pieces of information such as what your monthly payments will be, what portion of these payments will pay off principle verses interest payments and sometimes an amortization table that allows you to break your mortgage payments down by month.
In this article, I wanted to discuss some of the common technologies that are used to implement online mortgage calculators and the properties of these technologies. Some of these technologies include:
PHP with HTML forms: This is probably the most common implementation of such calculators. Basically, the web page containing the calculator will contain a form where you can input details about your mortgage (such as the mortgage rate, the principle, etc.) and then provide a button to calculate the payment details. When this button is pressed, the inputs you have entered will be sent back to the web server, where the calculations will be performed and another page will load with the mortgage results. While such calculators are very common, the requirement that mortgage points calculator another page with the results will load in the browser is a limitation in comparison to the next technology which is now being used by some more common calculators.
Javascript/AJAX: Javascript is a technology that can run programming code in your browser. A Javascript calculator will be able to use this code to compute the mortgage information in your browser and then set the results in various parts of your web page. As detailed above, the real advantage of this over the PHP with HTML forms above is that you do not need another page load when you perform the calculations. Another technology that can be integrated here is AJAX. AJAX allows the javascript code to communicate with the web server, that may potentially perform more complex calculations and return the results. The javascript can then display these results on the web page without the need for another page load. This technology essentially allows computations to be performed on a web server without the limitation of the page reloading from the first mentioned technology.