Ajax Design Patterns

Chapter 2. A Pattern-Led Tutorial

THIS CHAPTER INTRODUCES AJAX AND THE AJAX PATTERNS IN A THREE-PART TUTORIAL. THE FIRST section is a whirlwind tour of the key technologies, recommended if you’ve never worked with Ajax before. The second section shows how the higher-level patterns work to enhance a system; if you’ve already tinkered with Ajax, you might like to jump straight there. The final section proposes some exercises to try on your own.

The online home for this tutorial is http://ajaxify.com/tutorial/, where you’ll discover running demos for each example here. To work locally, you’ll need a standard PHP installation (version 5 or later) with Apache or a similar web server (no database is required). If you want the completed code, you’ll find a downloadable package at the above URL—consult Appendix B for more details on installation. Each section in the tutorial begins with a summary of the corresponding online demo as well as the directory within the code package where you’ll find the completed code.

Ajax Technologies in a Blink

This section includes a few exercises to get up to speed with the basic Ajax technologies. Each section is independent from the others, and each corresponds to a group in the Foundational Technologies Patterns (Part II), which are patterns about the raw technologies on which all Ajax applications are based.

Preparing the Demos

Each demo should live in its own directory, so create a tutorial directory under your server’s document root, and then create three ...