www.it-ebooks.info Summary of Contents Preface xi AJAX: the Overview Basic XMLHttpRequest 13 The “A” in AJAX 41 AJAX and POST Requests 85 Broader AJAX with Edit-in-place 129 Web Services and Slide-and-hide 167 More Web Services and a Back Button 199 Drag and Drop with AJAX Chess 243 A AJAX Toolkits 283 Index 287 www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Build Your Own AJAX Web Applications by Matthew Eernisse www.it-ebooks.info Build Your Own AJAX Web Applications by Matthew Eernisse Copyright © 2006 SitePoint Pty Ltd Expert Reviewer: Stuart Langridge Managing Editor: Simon Mackie Technical Editor: Craig Anderson Technical Director: Kevin Yank Printing History: First Edition: June 2006 Editor: Georgina Laidlaw Index Editor: Bill Johncocks Cover Design: Jess Bentley Cover Layout: Alex Walker Latest Update: October 2006 Notice of Rights All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews Notice of Liability The author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied Neither the authors and SitePoint Pty Ltd., nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages to be caused either directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book, or by the software or hardware products described herein Trademark Notice Rather than indicating every occurrence of a trademarked name as such, this book uses the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner with no intention of infringement of the trademark Published by SitePoint Pty Ltd 424 Smith Street Collingwood VIC Australia 3066 Web: www.sitepoint.com Email: business@sitepoint.com ISBN 0–9758419–4–7 Printed and bound in the United States of America www.it-ebooks.info About the Author Matthew lives in Houston, Texas, USA, and works for the Open Source Applications Foundation building the web UIs for Scooby, a next-generation web-based calendar client, and Cosmo, a calendar server In his abundant free time, he writes about AJAX, JavaScript, Ruby, and PHP at Fleegix.org, and operates EpiphanyRadio, a webcast radio station Matthew plays drums and speaks fluent Japanese About the Expert Reviewer Stuart Langridge has been playing with the Web since 1994, and is quite possibly the only person in the world to have a BSc in Computer Science and Philosophy He invented the term “unobtrusive DHTML” and has been a leader in the quest to popularize this new approach to scripting When not working on the Web, he’s a keen Linux user and part of the team at open-source radio show LUGRadio, and likes drinking decent beers, studying stone circles and other ancient phenomena, and trying to learn the piano About the Technical Director As Technical Director for SitePoint, Kevin Yank oversees all of its technical publications—books, articles, newsletters, and blogs He has written over 50 articles for SitePoint, but is best known for his book, Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL Kevin lives in Melbourne, Australia, and enjoys performing improvised comedy theatre and flying light aircraft About SitePoint SitePoint specializes in publishing fun, practical, and easy-to-understand content for web professionals Visit http://www.sitepoint.com/ to access our books, newsletters, articles, and community forums www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info To my wife, Masako, and my three little boys—Hiromasa, Akira, and Yoshiki—for all their love, patience, and support www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Table of Contents Preface xi AJAX: the Overview AJAX Web Applications The Bad Old Days Prehistoric AJAX What Makes AJAX Cool AJAX Technologies Data Exchange and Markup: XML W3C Document Object Model 10 Presentation: CSS 11 Communication: XMLHttpRequest 11 Putting it All Together: JavaScript 12 Summary 12 Basic XMLHttpRequest 13 A Simple AJAX Library 14 Starting our Ajax Class 14 Creating an XMLHttpRequest Object 16 Sending a Request 18 Processing the Response 23 Aborting the Request 28 Wrapping it Up 29 Example: a Simple Test Page 29 Example: a Simple AJAX App 33 Laying the Foundations 33 Handling the Result with showPoll 34 Starting the Process Over Again 36 Full Example Code 36 Running the App 38 Further Reading 38 JavaScript’s Object Model 38 XMLHttpRequest 39 Summary 39 The “A” in AJAX 41 Planned Application Enhancements 42 Organizing the Code 43 Loss of Scope with setTimeout 44 Creating the Monitor Object 47 www.it-ebooks.info ... and show you how to develop AJAX web applications of your own AJAX Web Applications AJAX can be a great solution for many web development projects—it can empower web apps to step up and take... Summary 165 v www.it-ebooks.info Build Your Own AJAX Web Applications Web Services and Slide-and-hide 167 Slide-and-hide Window 168 Web Services: an Overview 168 APIs... www.it-ebooks.info Build Your Own AJAX Web Applications Apache2 and OpenSSL on Windows 241 WSDL 241 Summary 242 Drag and Drop with AJAX Chess 243 AJAX Chess