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Mon, 24 Mar 2008

Ajax

Anthony T. Holdener III, Ajax: the definitive guide, O'Reilly

If your eyes have begun to glaze over at the mention of Web 2.0 by the money, money crowd then you're in good company but that's because the money, money crowd rarely have an interesting idea of their own rather than Web 2.0 being boring. The idea is basically Web Applications - full scale programs like word processors that will run in your browser.

Java was supposed to do this kind of thing but there was the JVM to be dealt with and also the whole program needed to be downloaded before anything would happen. It was all quite slow.

Ajax is what's happening now and the key to the success of the whole thing is the asynchronous nature of its communication with the server - in other words, little segments of a webpage can be updated - the whole page doesn't have to be reloaded for every new piece of information.

This book is not only the definitive guide to Ajax, it is also a pretty good guide to web technology right now, in terms of browsers, standards, and scripting languages.

The 957 pages with index start off with this background material and proceeds into issues such as planning and accessibility, functionality, and the rest, and then gets on with various examples of how to do things. All in all, the word 'definitive' is aptly used in the title.

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