Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006
Roaming through XMLDOM: An AJAX Prerequisite
On DevArticles.com, there’s a new article posted where they investigate the use of ActiveX methods to work through the XML returned from something like an Ajax call.
The twin tasks of the XMLHttp are handling the HTTP request, and then processing the XML response. The first one is easily done by writing the appropriate syntax for creating this object. This is what is accomplished in AJAX by invoking the new constructor for XMLHTTP object. This is but one of the objects of the XMLDOM -XML Document Object Model. In this article, we look at XMLDOM in some detail before calling the XML document in an AJAX rendition in a future article.
They step through the creation of an XMLDOM object and provide an overview of what’s inside the XML data (attributes, chatacter data, elements, etc). With that foundation laid, they show you (complete with code) how to get at the “innards” of the XML, pulling out the properties of the items first.
The rest of the tutorial demonstrates how to get the actual data out of the XML structure, followed by methods to take new information in insert it into the XML for updates.
ActiveX? You can’t seriously be recommending that people spend time developing their “Internet Explorer only”-development skills…
Exactly what I was thinking when I clicked on the link
Claus/Ted – I don’t know who you build web sites for but if you neglect your “Internet Explorer only development skills” then I feel sorry for your clients.
It’s silly to dismiss this article, it’s full of useful info about the approach and because translating it into cross-browser approach is trivial…
hey look it took me 2 seconds on Google to find one:
http://www.w3schools.com/dom/dom_parser.asp
So you don’t need to chuck a tanty whenever you see the word ActiveX
I would rather use/learn a method that wasn’t browser-specific, myself. After all, there’s only one of me ;-) Down with MSIE and their proprietary B.S. If we stop using it, maybe they’ll get the hint…
P.S. Great website – just getting my head around AJAX and all it can do… wish I had more of an opportunity to use it at work, though…
I came from FORTRAN background and later on tried Microsoft products and other open source. I keep questioning whether .NET is different from Java or that IE7.0 will have tabbed pages like Netscape 8.0 or Firebox. I try to keep an open mind recommending no one in special. I try to explain things to myself mostly and do write a tutorial if I find some one may be interested. I agree that we should move towards a totally open source environment, but probably this is a lost cause. I agree with all of you, strange as it may sound. It takes different things to make this world a happy place.
I’m glad that I’m not the only one disappointed with this article. Maybe I’ve read too many other articles, but this one didn’t seem to be well written.