November 2008
Beginner
448 pages
12h 25m
English
Content preview from Learning RailsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 16. Creating Dynamic Interfaces with Rails and Ajax
Rails emerged at about the same time as Ajax did, and the two technologies can work tightly together. Ajax, a set of technologies for creating much more interactive interfaces in the browser, can connect neatly to Rails’ more server-based approach. There’s much more than that, though, as the Rails framework includes a number of components designed specifically for making it easier to build Ajax applications from inside of Rails.
Note
As we mentioned back in Chapter 5, you can download
plug-ins, such as ActiveScaffold (http://activescaffold.com), that provide a lot of
built-in Ajax functionality to get you started exploring.
Ajax Basics
If you need to read this section, it’s probably a sign that you should find a book devoted to Ajax before building Ajax applications on top of Rails. Rails provides an excellent set of technologies for supporting Ajax development, but you still need to know how to work with the JavaScript browser side of Ajax before you can make effective use of them.
Note
Ajax development is itself worth a book or even a shelf of books, depending on how you want to go about it. Even Rails-based Ajax development has a book: Scott Raymond’s Ajax on Rails (O’Reilly, 2007). This chapter will get you started, but there’s an almost infinite amount of potential complexity around this subject.
Most of what Ajax does today is what used to be called Dynamic HTML, or DHTML. DHTML built on regular HTML by adding JavaScript ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.