ajax Beginnings

I just completed a tutorial at http://www.tizag.com/ajaxTutorial/ in order to get a quick look at ajax…

The tutorial goes fairly fast and gives you the basic understanding of how ajax works. Overall ajax in itself is fairly simple. I would recommend going to the 3w site for the specification.

In general there are only a few key steps to use basic ajax:

• Create the Object for the browser to use

Most browsers:

ajaxRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();

IE browsers:

ajaxRequest = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");

OR

ajaxRequest = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");

• Create a listener function for the state change

ajaxRequest.onreadystatechange = function(){ . . . }


• Open and Send the request to your server side code

ajaxRequest.open("GET", "serverTime.php", true);
ajaxRequest.send(null);

• When the state is set to completed, do something

if(ajaxRequest.readyState == 4){
document.myForm.time.value = ajaxRequest.responseText;
}

---


There are many good sites to continue the ajax journey. Here are a couple of my favorites.

There is a series of articles on Mastering Ajax located here:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-ajaxintro1.html

http://www.asp.net/ajax

PHP Beginnings

Once you have PHP installed and setup to run with you web server you can begin coding PHP. PHP reminds me a lot of other scripting languages, mostly javascript with a C syntax flair. PHP is designed to run server-side and serve up the page that was described in your PHP/HTML. This is much like Win-Forms for Microsoft developers.

I managed to go through the rather lengthy tutorial at http://www.tizag.com/phpT/. The tutorial was a good introduction to the language and went into some basic programming concepts as well. I was still hankering to apply the newly learned language, so I decided to work through the example, as well.

The example had a few deprecated pieces of code, that was easily addressed by Googling the deprecated value. I spent a little time adding session and cookies to see how they were working on the server and in the browser. Then I took advantage of Macromedia Dreamweaver’s IDE to look through the various functions that were available to me, and coded up the ones that I thought were interesting. Macromedia Dreamweaver worked well for the PHP development.

I am off to take a look at AJAX for now…