brant interactive

I’ve spent some time lately building a small AJAX app for a client. It was totally refreshing to work with something ‘new.’ I was also psyched with the results. No page refreshing really does make a difference. It might seem subtle at first, or maybe even unnoticeable for some, but once you get into the swing of it, it feels very different, much like - as is often said - a desktop application. I’ve been kind of ignoring all the hype of late surrounding ajax, but am glad to get into it. I can see the attraction to other things like flash remoting now/Flex, and hadn’t before. It does force you into a slightly more page controller approach though, which I’m not sure I like.

You need to control the page with the existing html delivered to the client, so if you are, let’s say doing basic create/read/update/delete stuff, you need js to handle that in the HTML. Now the server side stuff doesn’t have to be there obviously, but it it still feels very page-centric. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I prefer to get the flow of control out of the page. Maybe there are better ways of dealing with it, I’ll have to find out.

The project I finished recently uses CFAJAX, which is an ajax implementation for ColdFusion. It’s very easy to use and handles all the wiring of your CF method calls from your html client and returns the results. I started hunting around for something similar for ASP.NET and found quite a few open source projects that look really promising. I’d heard a lot about Microsoft’s Atlas but hadn’t realized it was ready yet. Well, it might not be technically ‘ready’ - it’s a CTP, but that’s very close. It requires ASP.NET 2.0 and is packed with lot of very cool things including new controls.

Debugging ajax is definitely a little more tricky as you have the new ‘hidden’ http request to deal with. I came across this, which is a very cool script for Firefox that allows you to see what is being sent/returned via the xmlHttpRequest object in a cool little floating layer. You need the base greasemonkey extension first before you can use it though. I have to point out though that I’ve had some trouble with the XmlHttpRequestDebugging script. It sometime seems to fail to activate. AS a backup, I’ve used the XmlHttpRequestTracing script, which is slightly less feature-rich, but gets the job done and is integrated into the built-in JavaScript console.