Windows Developer Power Tools

1.1 Building Sophisticated Ajax Applications with ASP.NET Atlas

Web pages were originally built around the document concept, with people viewing documents located on remote servers using web browsers. The first big shift from that paradigm happened when programmers started using server-side code to generate dynamic web pages for their users. That’s how web applications were born.

Web sites are no longer just collections of static documents; they can now accept user input and react to it in different ways. Until recently, most of the innovations in that area were made on the server side. Clients had poor scripting support, and the lack of standards made creating portable code difficult.

We are now facing another revolution, this time on the client side. Most popular browsers already support the XMLHttpRequest object, which allows the client to call the server from a script to update a page without reloading it. This drastically cuts application response time, so developers can now author web applications whose responsiveness rivals that of some desktop applications. Unfortunately, however, building such applications is still a challenge, because developers still need to write a lot of cross-browser JavaScript code (a difficult task).

Microsoft’s answer to the difficulties in client-side programming is the ASP.NET “Atlas” framework, which we’ll refer to simply as Atlas. This framework provides a lot of features that help developers concentrate on the application logic and let them forget ...