Thursday, June 26th, 2008
Book Excerpt: Practical Prototype and Script.aculo.us, Advanced Ajax Chapter 4
Andrew Dupont has written Practical Prototype and Script.aculo.us and has kindly given us a chapter excerpt to peruse.
You can download chapter 4 in PDF format here. The chapter covers “Ajax: Advanced Client/Server
Communication”:
By now, you’re almost certainly familiar with Ajax as a buzzword. Technically, it’s an acronym—Asynchronous JavaScript and XML — and refers specifically to JavaScript’s XmlHttpRequestobject,which lets a browser initiate an HTTP request outside the confines of the traditional page request.
Yawn. The technology isn’t the exciting part. Ajax is huge because it pushes the boundaries of what you can do with a web UI: it lets you reload part of a page without reloading the entire page. For a page-based medium like the Web, this is a seismic leap forward.
The chapter delves into the world of Ajax.Request, Ajax.Updater, Ajax.PeriodicalUpdater, by showing subtle examples of how to deal with timers, errors, and a lot more.
Like the chapter? check out the book home page.





Congratulations, Andrew!
It’s been a pleasure interacting with you on the prototype/scripty list these past couple years; didn’t know you were writing a book!
We have Christophe’s in the office, now we’ll have to get yours :)
The PDF link is broken.