Adobe® Dreamweaver® CS5 Bible

Chapter 16. Powering Ajax Pages with Spry

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding ajax

• Learning about spry

• Incorporating spry XML data

• Dreamweaver Technique: adding spry Data

• Validating with spry form widgets

• advancing layouts with spry widgets

• applying spry effects

Remember the first time you saw Google Maps? If you're like me, after you'd spent a good amount of time clicking and dragging the map around or zooming in on a satellite view, you did a right-click to confirm your suspicion that it was done with Flash. Wrong! The magic of Google Maps (http://maps.google.com), as well as other sophisticated sites such as Flickr (http://flickr.com) and Yahoo! Tech (http://tech.yahoo.com), all rely on a relatively new technology known as Ajax. Ajax combines advanced JavaScript coding, Document Object Model (DOM) manipulation, and XML data to allow partial page refreshes without long waits for a new page of HTML to arrive from the server.

Ajax is highly touted as a key component of the next-generation Internet, known in designer circles as Web 2.0. To make it possible for more and more people to integrate Ajax techniques into their sites, numerous implementations have been developed. One such implementation, Spry, was developed by Adobe and released for use by the general public. The Dreamweaver engineers took Spry to the next level and developed a series of objects and features to make it easy for designers to incorporate the advanced functionality of Ajax into their sites.

This chapter explores the relationship ...