[...]... used to describe standardsbased behavioral control DOM Scripting is integral to Ajax 12 Chapter 1 Summary In this chapter, I’ve explored the history of the term Ajax and attempted to define what it means In some ways, it’s easier to explain what Ajax isn’t: ■ Ajax is not a specific technology ■ Ajax is not an acronym Instead, Ajax is a methodology It’s a way of working with a set of ingredients to create... mean? What is Ajax? 5 Defining Ajax Jesse James Garrett’s newly coined term highlighted an explosion of activity among Web developers A lot of companies and individuals had been separately exploring this new methodology Now they had a word that they could use to describe their work Just three months after the publication of the original essay, Adaptive Path and O’Reilly Media organized an Ajax summit... is nothing new, ” they cried “We’ve been doing this for years and calling it remote scripting Ajax is just a buzzword.” While a geeky term like remote scripting was never going to sound as cool as a Trojan warrior, there was a kernel of truth to these petulant objections None of the technologies used for Ajax are particularly new Still, that’s no reason to dismiss the term outright The word Ajax is a... to Modern Web Design In Homer’s Iliad, Ajax is the name of the son of Telamon As a Greek warrior, he was famed for his strength and courage He carried a big ax and an even bigger shield to help in his fight against the Trojans He also had a very cool name The name Ajax is so cool that it was used more than once in The Iliad As well as the Telamonian Ajax, an Ajax the Lesser also fought in the Trojan... February 2005, he published an essay on the Adaptive Path Web site titled Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications (http://adaptivepath.com/publications/ essays/archives/000385.php) Figure 1.1 Jesse James Garrett on the Adaptive Path Web site 4 Chapter 1 In this essay, Garrett coined the term Ajax to describe techniques used by a new kind of Web application Google Suggest and Google Maps were demonstrating... exclaim, “That’s amazing! It’s a whole new paradigm for the Web!” The truth about Ajax lies somewhere in between It is an exciting technology The ability to refresh just part of a Web page with information from a server can be used to great effect On the other hand, Ajax is just a tool By itself, it can’t create a good user experience Content is still king What is Ajax? 7 OPTIONS According to my simple... perfect for creating Ajax applications Jesse James Garrett had XMLHttpRequest in mind when he coined the term Ajax The biggest problem with XMLHttpRequest is how long it takes to say it Even though there is an X in it, it was never going to catch on as a buzzword The word Ajax is a lot shorter and snappier, and it’s usually synonymous with using the XMLHttpRequest object That’s the kind of Ajax we’ll be dealing... That’s the kind of Ajax we’ll be dealing with in this book The Ajax Toolkit The XMLHttpRequest object is the engine that drives Ajax, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum As Jesse James Garrett said in his original essay, Ajax isn’t a technology It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways.” ANY SERVER-SIDE LANGUAGE Chances are, you want your... Ruby, Python, Perl, and many, many more None of these languages is more suited or less suited to Ajax than any other On the server, Ajax is language agnostic Use whatever is most comfortable for you or your programming team What is Ajax? 9 XML? You’d be forgiven for thinking that XML was a crucial component of Ajax applications The term XMLHttpRequest itself, as well as its long-windedness, is somewhat... problematic It implies that XML is a requirement for Ajax applications This simply isn’t true To be fair, the letters XML also appear in the word XMLHttpRequest—the core technology used in most Ajax implementations—but XMLHttpRequest doesn’t sound very cool Jesse James Garrett later updated his essay, making it clear that Ajax is not an acronym While Ajax may not work as an acronym, it’s an excellent . alt="" Bulletproof Ajax Jeremy Keith Bulletproof Ajax Jeremy Keith New Riders 1249 Eighth Street Berkeley, CA 94710 510/524-2178 800/283-9444 510/524-2221 (fax) Find us on the Web at: www.newriders.com To. using bullet- proof Ajax. I’ve created a companion Web site (http://bulletproofajax.com/), where you can download and try all the examples used in this book (http://bulletproofajax.com/code/) complex. The hard part is making sure your Ajax applications are bulletproof. In August 2005, New Riders published a great book called Bulletproof Web Design, by Dan Cederholm. Dan’s philosophy centers