Developing Web Applications with Perl, memcached, MySQL® and Apache

Chapter 16. Perl and Ajax

Web development has changed a lot since 2000. Web applications used to work in such a way that a user would enter information and submit the form. The server would check the form, and then create a reply of success or error, which required loading a new page, thus sending the entire page contents as a reply. Now things are different. Now web developers not only eliminate the need for requiring an entire page submission, but they also reduce the amount of data between client and server. This is a phenomenal development in that it allows web applications to behave more like traditional desktop applications.

This chapter gives an overview of how you can develop applications with Apache/mod_perl using Ajax. This book covers so many topics, and it should be noted that Ajax and JavaScript programming are entire worlds in and of themselves, in terms of information. Therefore, this chapter is meant to at least pique your interest, so you may dig deeper. For those of you who want to delve deeper, there are some excellent books on the topic, including Professional Ajax, by Nicholas C. Zaka, Jeremy McPeak, and Joe Fawcett (Wiley Publishing, 2007).

What Is Ajax?

Most of you who are reading this book probably know what Ajax is. But some developers, particularly those who focus more on the "back-end" of web development, may still think of web applications in terms of how they were implemented in the past. The author is one such person. But with many late nights studying, ...