Hello  Developers and Amigos!

Tonight I’m going to blog about one of the hottest topics out there… AJAX. I know most are probably sick of hearing about it, but I’ve been working on a new AJAX application (a shopping cart) for the past 5 hours and I’m still questioning a few things here…

  1. What the heck am I doing and how did I get here?
  2. Is this really a better solution?
  3. Where should I use it and where should I not use it?

I am still relatively knew to the whole AJAX world. I have my text book that I bought for 40 bucks (Canadian Dollars - I’ll put a link at the bottom for the same book). I won’t go into to many details on how AJAX works, but basically it the acronym stands for

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML

So as you can guess it mostly involves JavaScript, Document Object Model (DOM) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). If you have an understanding of these technologies I think it’s pretty straight forward to learn AJAX. For me the hardest part has been putting it all together and trying to decide where to use and where not to. I guess (and I am hoping) that this will improve over time. I found myself debating a few different ways to build my shopping cart and because AJAX is so new it’s very hard to find a lot of valuable information on it, besides the odd helloworld application.

As the technologies evolve, I think it will become easier to use. There are already some JSP Tag Libraries out there just for AJAX. Here is a link to one that looks pretty impressive although I didn’t have the time to check it out too much:

http://ajaxpatterns.org/Java_Ajax_Frameworks#AJAX_JSP_Tag_Library

If anyone has tried it or has any suggestions please share.

I won’t go into too much more detail about AJAX right now. I guess for me it’s been a bit of a learning curve to figure out how everything interacts, but it’s coming along… I promise you that work with me :) So… if you have the patience to try it out, I would definitely recommend it since it’s a very hot technology and I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon! Wish me luck on my shopping cart journey, all the best to you that decide to test it out. Here are some useful links that might help you get going (I’m throwing in a WEB 2.0 wiki link because it has a lot of good examples of AJAX applications):

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2EE/AJAX/
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-ajax1/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Also, as promised a link to the book that I started with (below). I find it great because there’s really not much for theory, just a lot of examples to get you going quickly (I see it’s cheaper now to, bonus).

AJAX Hacks - Bruce Perry

I hope I was able to help if you are thinking of looking into AJAX.  I think it’s worth a shot, it’s actually nice when you see it in action… after 4 or 5 hours! haha… Good luck with AJAX everyone! 
– Adrian