Dreamweaver® CS3 Bible

Chapter 18. Powering Ajax Pages with Spry

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding Ajax

• Learning about Spry

• Incorporating Spry XML data

• Dreamweaver Technique: Setting up Master/Detail Data Regions

• Validating with Spry form widgets

• Dreamweaver Technique: Customizing Spry Validations

• Advancing layouts with Spry widgets

• Dreamweaver Technique: Adding an Accordion Panel

• Applying Spry effects

• Dreamweaver Technique: Growing Images from Thumbnails

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 like 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 ...