Book Description
Written for experienced web developers, Professional Ajax shows how to combine tried-and-true CSS, XML, and JavaScript technologies into Ajax. This provides web developers with the ability to create more sophisticated and responsive user interfaces and break free from the "click-and-wait" standard that has dominated the web since its introduction.
Professional Ajax discusses the range of request brokers (including the hidden frame technique, iframes, and XMLHttp) and explains when one should be used over another. You will also learn different Ajax techniques and patterns for executing client-server communication on your web site and in web applications. By the end of the book, you will have gained the practical knowledge necessary to implement your own Ajax solutions. In addition to a full chapter case study showing how to combine the book's Ajax techniques into an AjaxMail application, Professional Ajax uses many other examples to build hands-on Ajax experience. Some of the other examples include:
web site widgets for a news ticker, weather information, web search, and site search
preloading pages in online articles
incremental form validation
using Google Web APIs in Ajax
creating an autosuggest text box
Professional Ajax readers should be familiar with CSS, XML, JavaScript, and HTML so you can jump right in with the book and begin learning Ajax patterns, XPath and XSLT support in browsers, syndication, web services, JSON, and the Ajax Frameworks, JPSpan, DWR, and Ajax.NET.
From the Back Cover
Combining tried-and-true CSS, XML, and JavaScript™ technologies, Ajax provides web developers with the ability to create more sophisticated and responsive user interfaces and break free from the "click-and-wait" standard that has dominated the web since its introduction.
This book discusses the range of request brokers (including the hidden frame technique, iframes, and XMLHttp) and explains when one should be used over another. You will also learn different Ajax techniques and patterns for executing client-server communication on your web site and in web applications. Each chapter builds on information in the previous chapters so that by the end of the book, you will have gained the practical knowledge necessary to implement your own Ajax solutions.
What you will learn from this book
Different methods for achieving Ajax communication and when to use each
A variety of Ajax design patterns to use in specific data retrieval circumstances
Techniques for using Ajax with RSS and Atom to produce a web-based news aggregator
How to use JavaScript Object Notation as an alternate data transmission format for Ajax communications
How to create Ajax widgets, such as a weather display and news ticker, that can be included in your web site
Who this book is for
This book is for web developers who want to enhance the usability of their sites and applications. Familiarity with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS is necessary, as is experience with a server-side language such as PHP or a .NET language.
Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.
One of the examples people seemed to like the most in Professional Ajax is AjaxMail, a full web-based email application making use of Ajax technologies. To aid in the continued development of AjaxMail, I have set up a project at SourceForge. Though still in the process of being set up, you can visit, check out some screenshots, and download the latest version. If you enjoyed the example and would like to contribute, you can sign up right on the site.
As an author, negative reviews initially feel like a shot in the heart. All of my blood, sweat, and tears...and someone doesn't appreciate it. Oh the horror! After a while, we authors learn to cope and tell ourselves that we can't please all of the people all of the time, and we need to try to be happy with pleasing some of the people some of the time. I actually take a different approach, oftentimes I'll reach out to these people and ask what I could do to make their experience better. What was it that you didn't understand? What can I do to clarify that part?
But you don't need to leave a review to get in touch with me personally. Wrox has been kind enough to set up forums for discussing issues surrounding their books. There is one for Professional JavaScript and one for Professional Ajax, which I would strongly encourage everyone to use since I check them daily. And if forums aren't your thing, head on over to my web site and contact me directly.
These books are living, breathing things that are constantly being changed and updated with each new printing. I need your help to make these the best books possible. In fact, there were a lot of people who contacted me about Professional JavaScript...one of them ended up as a technical editor on Professional Ajax and another ended up as a co-author. Coincidence?
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Is Web 2.0 the new Ajax?
7:41 PM PDT, May 2, 2006
Undoubtedly you've started hearing about Web 2.0 recently. The excitement over Ajax is now running into Web 2.0. But what is Web 2.0? The short answer is that no one really knows. Unlike Ajax, which has now been well defined as a methodology for sending or retrieving information without navigating away from the currently displayed page, Web 2.0 is without a hard and fast definition. A rotating definition of Web 2.0 is some sort of mix of Ajax, "user-friendly" design, and social interaction used to form the content of sites.
In truth, most definitions come in the form of "x was Web 1.0, y is Web 2.0," which seems to say nothing more than "that was old, this is new." Indeed, don't confuse Web 2.0 for a programming language or even a programming technique. The phrase has been taken from a conference first organized in 2004 (read the full details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0) and has since been thrown around almost as much as the term Ajax. But the question remains: if Web 2.0 is now, why don't we have an actual definition for it?
The book does a good job academically of showing how Ajax has evolved (itself a debatable topic) and how it is used in modern-day applications. The book doesn't marry the reader to any one particular web development framework, effectively citing examples in PHP, .NET, and JavaServer Pages. Practically, the authors exhibit a proper mix of (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Dynamic HTML and XmlHttpRequests, showing how the technologies are blended for developing next-gen UIs.
There are great discussions of advanced concepts like JSON, REST, and SOAP-based web services and how Ajax is incorporated into them. Also, coding to allow cross-browser compatibility is stressed throughout the book, particularly in instantiating an XMLHTTP object across IE, Firefox, Mozilla and Safari. The authors' zXml and XParser are cited as two of several third-party libraries to seamlessly pull this off.
Some gems that I found within the book include Chapter 8 - "Web Site Widgets", which is very helpful, giving practical demonstrations and usable code for several Ajax-driven mini-applications we could all use in our web projects. Chapter 7's case study of a Google Suggest-style autocomplete text box was very elegant, using JSON as an alternative to XML's typically verbose payload. Chapter 2 - "Ajax Patterns" also abstracts many of the features common to apps using Ajax (i.e., polling, autosave, incremental updating). All are well done and greatly appreciated.
Syntactically, the authors' programming style is very clever. While not exhaustively described, the book shows how to feign object-oriented programming in client-side JavaScript, making liberal use of such time-saving coding tricks like faux classes, inline function definitions and prototypes.
In criticism, the one chapter I found to be a letdown was Chapter 5 - "RSS/Atom", mainly because I'm very involved with work in that space. A terse description of content syndication is presented, but then followed exclusively by an analysis the FooReader.NET web-based RSS aggregator app. It's nice, but doesn't take a more holistic view of how Ajax is being used elsewhere. I would have also liked to see examples in emerging platforms, specifically Ruby on Rails and the Ajax support built directly into that web framework.
But overall this is a very good introductory read for experienced programmers wanting to get up to speed on the next big thing in advanced web UI development. I'm a better, more aware, more prepared developer for having read it.
"Professional Ajax" shoots from the hip. Go ahead, scour the web. Find every forum, article, or review about Ajax that allows users to post comments. You'll find a common complaint: "We've been doing that for years, we don't need a fancy new name." These guys understand this comment. They know what they're doing here, and they've got the battle scars to prove it. Call it what you want: Ajax, Web 2.0, or just business as usual, these authors know how to get the job done.
You won't find oversimplifications here: the authors don't skimp on details as they describe what goes into Ajax applications and show you how to build your own. The book concludes with a large and lovely guide through the process of developing a realistic Ajax-based email client similar to Gmail.
This is a nice pragmatic guide to coming up to speed with what's happening in interactive Web application development. You won't go wrong with this book.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review: Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
I found this book to be extremely informative. It is written in a clear, engaging style that makes it a pleasure to read. The examples are well constructed, relevant to real world applications, and thoroughly explained. The essential bits of code are highlighted for quick reading. The most irritating thing about web development is cross-browser support, and authors do a great job to making this less intimidating and point readers to libraries to abstract away the differences. Also covered are related JavaScript XML, XPath, XSLT support, web services, RSS/Atom.
PHP is the primary server side language used, though they chose .NET/C# for creating a web service. Microsoft's .NET web service tools are excellent, but I would have liked it if the authors had rounded this out with giving the basics of creating a web service using open source solutions.
If you want to learn Ajax techniques and related technologies, this book is well worth your time and money.
AJAX is the we technology everybody is talking abot now and its something that you should know if you are a web developer/designer now or want to be.
This book starts with a great chapter explaing how AJAX started and what it really is and how it works. Explaining how AJAX really works can be dificult for the beginner and the authors do it wonderfully. The next chapter goes into the basics of AJAX and how to create a very simple example(s) to give the user a solid foundation of how this new technology works (old technology but new way of using it actally).
The next chapter goes into Patterns which describes the programming techniques used by AJAX applications. This is a crucial chapter because it is this technique that allows developers to reall understand how to develop dynamic applications with AJAX. Lots of keywords are thrown around (throttling, periodic refreshing, multi-stage downloads, pending requests, etc) and each are excplained in detailed in a very concise manner that does not confuse the reader.
The next chapter focuses on the data format that is used to transfer this data (XML, XPath, XSLT) between each other using AJAX. Various techniques with the different browsers are discussed as well as workarounds if needed for the browser differences.
The rest of the book covers web services, JSON, widgets, andhte different frameworks that are available to use.
A very complete AJAX book that will get any reader ready to se AJAX in their web development work. A must by...
Last month, I was contacted by Wrox Press asking me to review of this book, Professional Ajax. I of course jumped at the opportunity, and have found this to be a very well rounded guide to Ajax technologies. It serves not only a comprehensive overview of all the various methods for handing complex asynchronous information exchange, but is also a handy reference guide for creating highly sought after effects for integration in your own site projects.
In case you didn't already know, Ajax itself was a term coined by Jesse James Garrett in an article he wrote for Adaptive Path in February of 2005. It simply stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. A little over a year later, and the entire web is abuzz with the new terminology. I was even able to attend a panel at SXSW on Ajax, led by Jesse himself. People just can't seem to get enough!
Aside from JavaScript, it is important to realize that this mantra is less about a specific language and more about a method of user experience enhancement. The authors of this book, Nicholas C. Zakas, Jeremy McPeak and Joe Fawcett do a good job of staying platform neutral and language agnostic. They cover a myriad of examples with PHP, Java and the Microsoft .NET platform.
They start out with a brief history, and show how the logic behind Ajax has evolved from framesets to iframes, and now the popular XMLHttpRequest. Since this is not an official W3C standard, a small bit of code forking is necessary. Most modern browsers handle it the same way, but Internet Explorer still treats it as an ActiveXObject. However, this change is slated with the release of IE7.
Since I'm already pretty familiar with the theories behind Ajax, the chapters that stood out to me the most were 6, 7 and 8. Chapter six was devoted to web services, covering SOAP, WSDL and REST. It also shows how to make a rudimentary browser calculator, and a spell checker using the Google API.
Chapter seven focused pretty exclusively on JSON, a lightweight alternative to using XML for asynchrounous data transmission. XML is argued to be more human readable, but since this information is created to be parsed and not read, the proponents of JSON prefer the lighter file size and ease of use.
The drawbacks of using JSON over XML are that there is not native support for it in any languages other than JavaScript, as it's a code variant and not a markup language. So, some content transformation is involved in making use of it. An additional benefit of XML is that Flash can parse it natively more easily, as of version 8. It's really just based on preference.
Using JSON, they teach how to recreate Google's popular auto-suggest feature, which completes possible search terms as you type. Chapter eight is where things really start to get fun though, because they teach you how to make even more web-based widgets. These include an animated news ticker, a weather checker, and a localized website search engine using a few external API's.
The whole of chapter nine is devoted to constructing a web-based POP3 email application that mimicks the functionality of Gmail, including the courtesy of keeping the browser's Back and Forward buttons working normally. Chapter ten finishes off the book nicely by covering some popular Ajax frameworks, such as JPSpan for PHP, DWR for Java SDK and Ajax.NET for the .NET platform. Bascially, if you want to really delve into Ajax concepts, this book is ideal.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Concise and Simple Introduction to Ajax, March 17, 2006
Professional Ajax will enable you to get up to speed with Ajax, the problems that Ajax solves, and common patters for Ajax use. The authors also introduce you to a cross-platform library to ease your own script development. The writing style is clear and no-nonsense.
I was happy to see their approach in explaining scripting techniques. Once to address IE, once to address Mozilla, and once to address the combined approach. I found this to be very helpful, as most sources jumble it all together. I was not happy to see that Opera and Safari were entirely ignored. The world doesn't need another Ajax app that fails in these browsers!
I was also surprised to see that the book is most definitely not platform-agnostic. At least not to the extent that I was led to believe by the description and comments. Examples are C# and PHP.
Too much time was spent focused on the server side. For example, the web servcies section spent more time showing you how to setup a web service in .Net than it did showing you how to consume it with Ajax. The server side could have been abstracted -- in a book about Ajax, the server side is a black box -- all that matters is what is sent out, and what is returned. I couldn't care less about the algorithms used to create the return.
All-in-all, it was a good read. Fast, to the point, concise. I'd also recommend Ajax in Action for a more thorough review of patterns, a look at elegantly creating reusable Ajax components, and coverage of other Ajax-related topics like usage of frameworks.
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