Adding Ajax

Making Existing Sites More Interactive

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.