Adding Ajax

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 399 pages
• Published by: O'Reilly Media, Inc. June 20, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0596529368
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0596529369
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.1 inches
• Weighs: 1.4 pounds

Product Description
Ajax can bring many advantages to an existing web application without forcing you to redo the whole thing. This book explains how you can add Ajax to enhance, rather than replace, the way your application works. For instance, if you have a traditional web application based on submitting a form to update a table, you can enhance it by adding the capability to update the table with changes to the form fields, without actually having to submit the form. That's just one example.

Adding Ajax is for those of you more interested in extending existing applications than in creating Rich Internet Applications (RIA). You already know the "business-side" of applications-web forms, server-side driven pages, and static content-and now you want to make your web pages livelier, more fun, and much more interactive. This book:

• Provides an overview of Ajax technologies, and the importance of developing a strategy for changing your site before you sit down to code
• Explains the heart and soul of Ajax: how to work with the XMLHttpRequest object
• Introduces and demonstrates several important Ajax libraries, including Prototype, script.aculo.us, rico, Mochikit
• Explores the interactive element that is Ajax, including how to work with events and event handlers that work across browsers
• Introduces the concept of web page as space, and covers three popular approaches to managing web space
• Explains how to make data updates, including adding new data, deleting, and making updates, all from within a single page
• Describes the effects Ajax has on the Web-breaking the back button, losing browser history, dynamic effects that disappear when the page is refreshed, and more
• Covers advanced CSS effects, including drag and drop "scroll bars", pagination, and the use of SVG and the Canvas object
• Explores mashups-Ajax's ability to combine data from different web services in any number of ways, directly in our web pages

You don't need to start over to use Ajax. You can simply add to what you already have. This book explains how.

About The Author
Shelley Powers is a software developer/architect, photographer, and writer who has authored numerous computer books on web development and technologies, including the O'Reilly titles "Developing ASP Components," "Unix Power Tools, Third Edition," "Essential Blogging," and "Practical RDF". Through the years, Shelley has also contributed several articles on cross-browser development, standards, RDF, JavaScript, CSS, and XML for several publications, and has worked with some of the world's leading companies. Shelley's tech web site is http://burningbird.net.

Reader Reviews
§ The book title delivers a vital clue. "Adding Ajax" has a special, limited focus that may be right up your alley -- if you are evaluating enhancing existing Web applications by adding Ajax effects. Developers looking to evaluate building an Ajax-based application architecture from the ground up may not be satisfied. The book itself is a fast read. That is not because of lack of content -- there is plenty of that! Still, Shelley Powers has organized the information so that most of the chapters can be read out of order, as independently as possible from the others. Chapter 5, which deals with accordion menus, tabbed paging, and overlays with Ajax and common script libraries can be skipped if you are most interested in user updates of live data in Chapter 6 without a problem. The author cites known experts for related material (like Jeremy Keith and Eric Meyer) and gives lots of URLs for follow-up material. The book is pretty much practice-oriented and contains lots of code. That leads to my one quibble: there is a lot of code here that does not seem to be available in downloadable form. Some people would find it convenient to have the code examples in a way that could be immediately tested on a server. Re-typing is a drag. The O'Reilly page for this book has a *very* impressive Table of Contents, with content previews -- but no code download. Other than that, this is a very fine book. §