Ajax Patterns and Best Practices (Expert's Voice)

Ajax Patterns and Best Practices is a quality book for the intermediate to advanced ajax programmer who is looking to expand their skills.

— Rob Sanheim, co-editor of Ajaxian and software engineer with Seeking Alpha

Ajax is taking us into the next generation of web applications. Ajax has broken the client-server barrier by decoupling the client from the server, but an Ajax application still requirements a server to extract content from. The most effective use of Ajax and the server requires an understanding of REST, an architectural style used to define Web services.

Ajax Patterns and Best Practices explores dynamic web applications that combine Ajax and REST as a single solution. A major advantage of REST is that like Ajax, it can be used with today's existing technologies.

This is an ideal book whether or not you have already created an Ajax application. Because the book outlines various patterns and best practices, you can quickly check and verify that you're building an efficient Ajax application.

Inside the book, the patterns will answer the following questions:

• What is Ajax, and REST and why do you even care? And if I should care what are some examples of websites that make effective use of Ajax and REST?
• What are the absolute basics of Ajax and REST and what parts of those basics should I use?
• How should deal with large amounts of data? Should I cache the data? Should I get the data piece fed to me? (Patterns: Cache Controller, and Infinite Data)
• People keep telling me that sessions and cookies are bad? Are they bad? What should I do? And while I think about how about generating content for other devices? (Permutations pattern)
• I want to fix the back-button problem of the HTML browser. (State Navigation pattern)
• What is the best way to create a mashup? (REST Based Model View Controller pattern)
• My page has so many links managed by JavaScript, and I am loosing control, help me make this more organized! (Decoupled Navigation pattern)
• I understand that HTTP means I send data to the server, how about the server sending me some data without asking for it? (Persistent Communications pattern)
• My server side code looks like a mess with tags and code pieces everywhere how can I organize and make my HTML page behave like a SOA client and use REST based web services? (Content chunking pattern)

About The Author
Christian Gross is a consultant with vast experience in the client/server world. He has consulted for Microsoft on DNA solutions, and he has held consulting positions with Daimler Benz, Microsoft, NatWest, and other major corporations. Gross was a contributor to Professional Active Server Pages, Professional SQL Server 6.5 Administration, Professional NT Internet Information Server Administration, and Programming Microsoft Windows 2000 Unleashed. He is the author of A Programmer's Introduction to Windows DNA.

Reader Reviews
While this book does present useful topics that are particularly relevant to AJAX applications, my main problem with it is the poorly edited and structured way it is written. The book is full of paragraphs like this one (found at the very beginning of the "Applicability section" of the "Decoupled Navigation Pattern"): "The Decoupled Navigation pattern is used when content is navigated. The statement is obtuse and does not really say anything because HTML content is always navigated. However, because of the way Dynamic HTML is used, content navigation is sometimes used to generate an effect. When links are used to generate effects, the Decoupled Navigation pattern does not apply." That's the whole paragraph beginning to end -- what the heck is this trying to say? Apparently aware of how non-sensical this is, the author starts the next paragraph with "To clarify this explanation..." and then goes on to present an example of a website in Swiss German (I think), with no translation given. Two pages of more examples and a summary rules-of-thumb later, and the only implied take-away is that the Pattern applies when decision-making and data processing are required, and the contents of the page change but not completely. A few sections like this could be forgiven (and you could quibble as to why he had to write this example this way), but stuff like this prevails throughout every chapter. More often than not, ideas which with some thought could have been condensed into a few sentences, result in half a page of digressions and logical dead-ends. Here's another one: "The need to separate the resource from the representation has not been adequately explained, and some developers may wonder why it is necessary at all. After all, may websites work well and nobody has complained too loudly. The reason why many websites work well is because they have probably implemented the separation of resource from representation. And those that have not done so have received complaints." Upon reading this, I feel some irreplaceable portion of my lifespan has just been wasted. At least one good thing this book does is that it only focuses on Patterns that are particular to an AJAX environment (e.g. Persistent Communications, Decouple Navigation, etc.), without wasting time on stuff that is applicable to other more general software design settings (which plenty of other books already cover of course). While the ideas in this book are interesting and potentially useful to somebody beginning to design an AJAX application, the writing style makes reading it a true chore. Surely there is better written stuff out there on AJAX software design.