AJAX
· Asynchronous Javascript And XML: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)
· Term coined in February, 2005 to describe combination of Dynamic HTML and Asynchronous server request processing.
· But techniques used in industry long before. E.g. AJAX Cognos1, Portlets (JSR 168) Cognos2.
· Javascript asynchronous event model handles user interactions (e.g. drag and drop) and server interactions allows background processing
· XMLHTTP object, returns HTTP response as a DOM or a File or a Stream
o HTML – snippets to dynamically update an HTML node in the tree, Node.innerHTML =
o XML – use XSLT to process File/Stream or Javascript to process DOM and update HTML dynamically
o SOAP – send raw SOAP Request using XMLHTTP, use XSLT or DOM to process SOAP Response
o JSON – subset of Javascript data structures, simplest way to transfer data
· Available Frameworks (all free, except Bindows)
o Bindows - http://www.bindows.net/ , First, good support for SOAP
o Google - http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/ , most famous but not a pure model (code in Java,compile into HTML, Javascript
o Yahoo - http://yuilibrary.com , my original favorite, a library not a framework
o jQuery - http://jquery.com , the one everyone is telling me to use now, a library not a framework
o Microsoft - http://asp.net/ajax/ - ASP based (good server side support)
· Some online resources
o http://www.w3schools.com/ajax/default.asp
o http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX
