Datasheet

Summary
This chapter gave you an introduction to and overview of how Ajax is used today. As you can see,
the emphasis is on making online applications feel like desktop applications, which is what Ajax
excels at. A great deal of making that work has to do with using JavaScript in the browser, and
that’s what the next chapter is about: getting up to speed in JavaScript, the very foundation of Ajax.
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Fundamental Ajax
Part I
Ajax-enabled pop-ups
O
nline map applications aren’t the only ones using Ajax-enabled pop-ups; you can find them all
over. For example, take a look at the Top 100 Netflix titles at
www.netflix.com/Top100,
shown in the following figure.
Getting information on the Netflix top 100 movies
All you’ve got to do to get more information on a movie is to let the mouse cursor rest on the name
of the movie, and the application automatically downloads data from the server using Ajax and dis-
plays that data in a popup, as you see in the figure. That’s Ajax at work, once again: no page refresh
needed, and no need to click the Back button in your browser to get back to the original display.
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