Flex’s blog

I’ve been working on creating a database architecture at work and while I was at, I had decided to create a simple web front end to the architecture using PHP and Oracle. Along the way, one of my pages took a bit too long to load so a coworker of mine suggested in a kidding way that I should look into AJAX. At first, I laughed at that notion but after I googled around a bit, I thought that perhaps using AJAX wasn’t a bad idea after all.

Why would I use AJAX for my work? Well what I really sought after was being able to load data in the background while the immediate webpage was already presented to the user. It’s all about the user’s experience when it came to the web front end and AJAX was a perfect complement to that.

One little problem - I didn’t really know squat about AJAX. You’re talking to someone who writes C/C++ code and Win32 stuff.. I know some Perl and PHP but I’ve never really touched Javascript nor anything related to XML stuff. After another Google search, I came across a series of excellent articles over at IBM that detail some very simple operations you can do with AJAX. If you’ve always wondered what AJAX and really Web 2.0 is all about, I encourage you to read these pages here:

Part 1: Introduction to AJAX

Part 2: Make asynchronous requests with JavaScript and AJAX

Part 3: Advanced requests and responses in AJAX

Part 4: Exploiting DOM for web response

Part 5: Manipulate the DOM

Finally.. yes I am a believer in stuff nowadays. It’s pretty cool to see it all work in action.