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Introduction to AJAX (Tuesday)

Started by R. Andrew Lamonica, 2006-03-11T20:35:14-06:00 (Saturday)

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R. Andrew Lamonica

Here is the official announcement of the AJAX presentation mentioned previously.  I’m sorry about the late notice.  I should have posted the poll for the best day sooner.  If you plan to come invite a friend or two so that I don’t end up talking to just one person. ;-)

The Facts about AJAX

R. Andrew Lamonica

P.S. I will be giving away some cheesy prizes from the Google Store.  

If anyone has an idea about how I should give them away let me know.  Otherwise, I will probably select randomly.  I have been thinking about an AJAX giveaway process, but I only have a day left to come up with something and I have been busy.

William Grim

One valid way would be to just give them to me.  >:)
William Grim
IT Associate, Morgan Stanley

R. Andrew Lamonica

Nice try Mike.  

I did think of a way to mix AJAX and prize selection but I will have to see if I have time to make it work.

By the way, how do you like my logo?

[img align=center]http://www.cs.siue.edu/news/images/2006/2006-03-11_The_Facts_about_AJAX.png[/img]

Just so you know, you can view a higher resolution copy of the Computer Science news images by clicking on them in their individual story page.

William Grim

I like it.  The code looks all jumbled and makes me think it's supposed to be mumbo jumbo.  I suppose that was your aim, considering none of us know much about AJAX.
William Grim
IT Associate, Morgan Stanley

Tyler

What's interesting to note is that remote scripting like AJAX has been around for awhile, but it wasn't so popular until Google got a hold of it.
Retired CAOS Officer/Overachiever
SIUE Alumni Class of 2005

R. Andrew Lamonica

It is amazing that a few smart people can change an industry like that.  However, the technology is also in tune with the times because customers are starting to value interoperability more than they ever did before and XML was designed to be as the king of interoperable data formats.  Many programming languages have added XML parsers in the last few years it just turned out that more people have XML supporting web-browsers than any other XML framework.  This was a perfect situation for companies (Google and the like) that wanted both open-standards and the ability to reach a wide user base.

F.Y.I. AJAX is not remote-scripting it is client-side-scripting, but I will get into the difference tonight at the talk so there is no need to explain it now.

Tyler

I think you can use Ajax and similar technology to access databases in the background (such as Google Suggest), so I think this may fall into a grey area.

If a page has some iframe that accesses a dynamic page populated from some datasource, wouldn't that fall into this category?
Retired CAOS Officer/Overachiever
SIUE Alumni Class of 2005

R. Andrew Lamonica

You should come to the talk.  I will show how to do all of these things.

R. Andrew Lamonica

Thanks to everyone who came to the presentation.  I hope to do another one on a smaller topic so that it will not run as long.  CSS perhaps or maybe just JavaScript.  For those of you who wanted links to the tools I used during the presentation I have made a page of them.

AJAX and Web-development Tools

You can also see the examples that were shown during the presentation by visiting http://lamonica.info/projects/factsaboutajax but they are not very organized, so you might want to wait a day or so to see if I have time to clean them up. ;-)

P.S. Even if you were not at the presentation you might like the "Web Developer Toolbar (FireFox Extension)".

rajiv

Javascript with an xmlHttpRequest to a web service
might be more interesting than CSS. Just a suggestion.

William Grim

Quotetfizzle wrote:

I think you can use Ajax and similar technology to access databases in the background (such as Google Suggest), so I think this may fall into a grey area.

If a page has some iframe that accesses a dynamic page populated from some datasource, wouldn't that fall into this category?

Unless the javascript can cause the client itself to access a database directly, then what you said wouldn't fall into that category.  From what you said, it sounds like the dynamic page is created from the server (e.g. server-side scripting).  Effectively, this means the javascript gets access to the DB through a middle-man that has limited knowledge about how to use the DB.
William Grim
IT Associate, Morgan Stanley

Tyler

Quotegrimw wrote:

Unless the javascript can cause the client itself to access a database directly, then what you said wouldn't fall into that category.  From what you said, it sounds like the dynamic page is created from the server (e.g. server-side scripting).  Effectively, this means the javascript gets access to the DB through a middle-man that has limited knowledge about how to use the DB.

You could be right.  I do remember one of Andrew's examples with the clock.  It seemed pretty much like a Javascript that ran every second that pulled data from the PHP page that generated the time and then updated the info on the page.  Isn't that kind of what I said about an iframe that accesses some dynamically generated page?

From the examples I saw, (I will admit I only saw a couple) the client did not directly access the database.  It accessed some "middleman" application dynamic stuff (I believe it was PHP generated dynamic pages).  Then it read the generated page/information and updated the information (in this case the time) via Javascript.

I don't mean to start an argument.  I know that you could outprogram me while slamming a pint in one hand and rolling doobies in the other, but I think it'd kind of the same thing.
Retired CAOS Officer/Overachiever
SIUE Alumni Class of 2005

William Grim

Yeah, I know what you meant about iframes.  I thought you were saying javascript could access databases directly, which, as far as I know, is currently impossible.

Quotetfizzle wrote:

I don't mean to start an argument.

I know you weren't.  ;-)
William Grim
IT Associate, Morgan Stanley