Preface
The Wikipedia page for Ajax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax) provides more than 20 meanings for the word, including the names of two characters in Homer’s Iliad (Ajax the Great and Ajax the Lesser), the name of an Amsterdam soccer team, a couple of automobiles, a horse, and—my personal favorite—a household cleaner made by Colgate. However, Ajax is also the term for a collection of technologies many say could revolutionize the Web. If various weblogs and online and print commentaries are to be believed, Ajax is the future of web development, the enabler of Web 2.0, and probably a cure for fatal diseases, as well.
Many web developers want to provide their users with a far richer client experience but don’t want to (or, for practical reasons, cannot) write a Windows client application. Ajax could be just what they need. It allows web applications to behave almost like desktop applications, with features such as keyboard shortcuts and drag and drop.
ASP.NET “Atlas” (or Atlas, as we will refer to it throughout this book) is the code name for a new set of technologies from Microsoft that provide Ajax-like functionality for the ASP.NET developer, offering many of the same benefits for Ajax development that ASP.NET provides for server-side development.
I have resisted writing about Ajax for quite some time. I have used the technologies that make up Ajax for years, and I have written about each individually, but the term Ajax had to be coined in early 2005 before the technology really ...