Leveraging Drupal®: Getting Your Site Done Right

Chapter 12. The jQuery Chapter

After Katherine Bailey's excellent series of articles (see "The Lowdown on jQuery in Drupal": http://raincitystudios.com/blogs-and-pods/katherine-bailey/the-lowdown-jquery-drupal), there is certainly less mystery in the Drupal world concerning the use of the JavaScript library, which (in its own words) "is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages" (see "jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library" home page: http://jquery.com/). And articles such as Katherine's certainly illuminate any AHAH problems developers tend to encounter.

But, what is Ajax? And what is AHAH? How do you wrap your head around the whole Rich Internet Application framework question? Also, why did Drupal chose jQuery over other extremely serious contenders? And what can rich internet middleware do for an application like the On-Line Literary Workshop?

Anatomy of a Rich Internet Application Framework

In this section, you will first be introduced to the basics of what are known as Rich Internet Applications, something that has emerged as a way of giving the same sturdiness and quick response to Internet applications as that enjoyed by desktop applications, thanks to a lot of progress in the use of JavaScript in web browsers. You will be introduced to the Document Object Model (DOM) as a way of accessing all browser objects, and will learn how to access the ...