After reading more and more about Ajax I decided to check this technology out myself. In short Ajax (Asyncronous Javascript And Xml) is a way to call server side logic from your GUI without doing a full postback/refresh cycle.
Any web developer knows that this is billiant. The way it is done is via the good old XMLHttpRequest object that has been around for years. I myself first used this object (ActiveX) in the good old ASP programming days. I think it was about 2001/2002 that I used this server side in ASP to fetch XML documents and render via XSLT. I remember there was two versions (XMLHttpRequest and ServerXMLHttpRequest).
This object can be used on the client side (browser) using JavaScript. And most uplevel browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror etc) has support for this.
The “new” is that this object combined with some advanced javascript and a good framework now allows the developer to create web applications where the GUI calls server side logic and updates it self without the need for a full postback.
I have looked into a few of .NET framworks for Ajax thats out there:
- Ajax.NET professional (http://www.schwarz-interactive.de/)
- Anthem.NET (http://anthem-dot-net.sourceforge.net/)
- Microsoft Atlas (http://atlas.asp.net)
More on these to come