Ajax Design Patterns

1.1. Ajax and the Usable Web No longer are you forced to wait five seconds a web page to reload every time you click on something. Ajax applications change in real-time. They let you drag boxes around instead of clicking on arrows and typi...

1.2. The Rise of Ajax On February 18, 2005, Jesse-James Garrett published an online article "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications" (http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php). The Web was becoming richer...

1.3. Ajaxifying the Web: The Story of Portals If you Google for "year of the portal", you'll find ample evidence that every year since 1996 has been the year of the portal. It's just around the corner, really. The idea has so much promise: the fir...

1.4. Webifying the Desktop: The Story of Office Applications Attempts to webify office applications are almost as old as the Web itself. It's now part of computer folklore that Netscape's Marc Andreesen exclaimed, in the mid-1990s, that MS-Wind...

1.5. Characteristics of Ajax Applications Earlier on, Ajax was defined as a technology that "builds on standard web technologies to deliver a rich, responsive, user experience." This shouldn't be seen as a binary thing, because it's useful to...

1.6. The Ajax Technologies Here's a quick rundown of the various technologies involved in Ajax. To begin with, there are several that have always been popular on the Web, which are relatively well-understood by the development com...

1.7. Anatomy of a Server Call At a lower level, how does an Ajax interaction look? Here's a typical sequence of events. Let's begin with the application startup sequence (Figure 1-4): Figure 1-4. Typical startup sequence User points b...

1.8. Ajax Trends This book has certainly been a moving target. There were already quite a few Ajax applications available when the "Ajax" term was coined, and the space has since exploded, propelled by the rush of activity in what's come t...

1.9. Conclusions This chapter has introduced the basic technologies of Ajax, provided overviewed characteristic examples, and given some indication of where it's all going, though there will doubtless be some surprises along the way. Even if the "...