August 2006
Intermediate to advanced
182 pages
4h 34m
English
Content preview from Ruby on Rails: Up and RunningBecome 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,
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.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.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.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.
Chapter 6. Ajax
Ajax is one of the most important emerging trends in web applications. Web sites like Google Maps and Gmail dramatically demonstrate that web applications do not have to be slow, clunky, page-at-a-time web forms. Ajax techniques can reclaim some of the fluidity and responsiveness that was lost when we moved from desktop applications to web applications.
Ajax (which stands for the cryptic “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML”) is a technique for building web pages that are more interactive, exciting, and dynamic. Ajax is asynchronous: JavaScript libraries can communicate with the server at any time, and the web page need not be frozen while waiting for a response. Ajax uses JavaScript on the browser, any language on the server, and XML to specify messages.
When you use this emerging technique, a web page can communicate with the server at any time, updating only those portions of the display that need it. Users experience more responsive web pages, with immediate feedback. Even though using Ajax techniques usually requires significantly more sophisticated design and implementation skills, the benefits to the end user are so great that Ajax-enabled web applications will soon become the rule, not the exception. Fortunately, Rails makes Ajax so simple that, for typical cases, using Ajax is almost as easy as not using it.
How Rails Implements Ajax
Rails has a simple, consistent model for how it implements Ajax operations. Once the browser has rendered and displayed the initial ...
Become 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,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
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.