Understanding AJAX

Book excerpt: AJAX: fast mastery for experienced Web developers! Already an experienced Web developer? Apply your skills in today’s fastest-growing area of Web development: AJAX! Building on what you already know, this fast-paced guide will show you exactly how to create rich, usable Internet applications. Joshua Eichorn teaches through sophisticated code examples, including extensive server-side PHP code. You won’t just learn how to code AJAX applications: Eichorn covers the entire development lifecycle, from use cases and design through debugging. He also presents detailed application case studies, including a start-to-finish update of a non-AJAX application that addresses everything from feature improvements to changing usage patterns. Coverage includes: · How AJAX changes the conventional Web development cycle · Problems created by the AJAX paradigm -- and how to avoid them · Adding AJAX to existing Web applications: key considerations · Using core AJAX technologies, including the XMLHttpRequest object · Consuming data returned to an AJAX application using both XSLT and JSON · Building more usable AJAX applications: guidelines and downloadable resources · Use cases: solving real-world problems in the AJAX environment · Libraries and toolkits for simplifying AJAX development, including Sarissa, scriptaculous, and HTML_AJAX · A complete guide to AJAX debugging · Supporting browsers without XMLHttpRequest by using IFrames or cookies · JSON data encoding debugging guide, which covers tools for Firefox and Internet Explorer · A list of libraries, which includes PHP, .NET, Java, and other libraries that can be used with any server language