Ajax for Web Application Developers

Reusable components and patterns for Ajax-driven applications

Ajax is one of the latest and greatest ways to improve users’ online experience and create new and innovative web functionality. By allowing specific parts of a web page to be displayed without refreshing the entire page, Ajax significantly enhances the experience of web applications. It also lets web developers create intuitive and innovative interaction processes.

Ajax for Web Application Developers provides the in-depth working knowledge of Ajax that web developers need to take their web applications to the next level. The book shows how to create an Ajax-driven web application from an object-oriented perspective, and it includes discussion of several useful Ajax design patterns.

This detailed guide covers the creation of connections to a MySQL database with PHP 5 via a custom Ajax engine and shows how to gracefully format the response with CSS, JavaScript, and XHTML while keeping the data tightly secure. It also covers the use of four custom Ajax-enabled components in an application and how to create each of them from scratch.

The final section of the book combines the individual code examples and techniques from earlier chapters of the book into one larger, Ajax-driven application—an internal web mail application that can be used in any user-based application, such as a community-based web application. Readers will learn not only how to create and use their own reusable Ajax components in this application

but also how to connect their components to any future Ajax applications that they might build.

Table of Contents

I: Getting Started

1 Introduction to Ajax

2 The Request

3 The Response

4 Rendering the Response with XHTML and CSS

II: Creating and Using the JavaScript Engine

5 Object-Oriented JavaScript

6 Creating the Engine

7 Using the Engine

8 Debugging

9 Extending the Engine

III: Creating Reusable Components

10 Accordion

11 Tree View

12 Client-Side Validation

13 Data Grid

IV: Ajax Patterns

14 Singleton Pattern

15 Model View Controller

16 The Observer Pattern

17 Data Reflection Pattern

18 Interaction Patterns

19 Usability Patterns

V: Interaction

20 Understanding Ajax Database Interaction

21 Interacting with a Database: The Server-Side

22 Advanced Ajax Database interaction

VI: Touches

23 Securing Your Application

24 Best Practices

About the Author

Kris Hadlock has been a contract web developer and designer since 1996. He is a featured columnist and writer for InformIT and numerous web design magazines. He is also the founder of Studio Sedition, a web application development firm, and is the cofounder of 33Inc, the company responsible for DashboardHQ. He maintains a blog called Designing with Code, which focuses on web application development from a design perspective and often features useful code snippets to help enhance web applications.You can find all of the above and more about Kris on his website at www.krishadlock.com.