To the author: Brett McLaughlin

[Nimchi Yung]

Hi,

Does your new book come with examples? If so, are your examples towards using Java, PHP or .NET?

Thanks,
Nimchi

[Liyaquat Ali]

Hi,

I M not Brett Nor am an Author But I thought I might still try and answer your query.

Ajax uses Javascript on the client side. It interacts with server side scripts,components or services. The server side could be written in JAVA(JSP/Servlets/Services), php, ASP.NET, CGI etc..

This book is about Ajax, so it would concentrate on how to us Ajax and that would be through Javascript on the client side. The server responses could be text or XML data I dont think this book would be concentrating on programatic implementations on how to generate that response on the server, this book would only concentrate on how to use the server response.

I hope this helps.

[Christophe Verré]

There is a sample chapter at O'Reilly :
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/headra/

Have a look. You'll notice that everything goes around a sample application (Katie�s report). PHP source is also printed (PHP at a glance) but as it is mentionned : "You don't need to understand this script to learn Ajax"

[Liyaquat Ali]

Thanx for the link Satou,

I will go through the chapter as well, so I can get the feel of the book.

[Brett McLaughlin]

Hi there-

Yeah, the book really focuses on the client-side. All the server-side examples are in PHP, simply because PHP is one of the most "readable" languages. But, as you'll read in the intro to Head Rush Ajax, all the applications are written with a clean separation between the client-side and server-side. So you could easily replace all the examples with Java servlets or Ruby with little effort at all.
The PHP code is all in the book, and it's all heavily annotated; and because PHP is so readable, I think you don't need to know much PHP at all (assuming you know -some- programming language, even if it is just JavaScript) to follow along.
To be honest, I actually started by using a Java servlet in Chapter 1, and it was just too confusing. If you didn't really know servlets, you got lost; and that distracts from the core message, which is Ajax, not server-side programming.
Also, all the code is both running online, and downloadable, at http://www.headfirstlabs.com/books/hrajax/, so you can check it out ahead of time.

Enjoy!
Brett

[Christophe Verré]

Correcting the link
Head First Labs

[Pradeep bhatt]

Brett
Are you using any AJAX engine in your book?

[Christophe Verré]

what do you mean by engine ? Is there such a thing in Ajax ?

[Pradeep bhatt]

Originally posted by Satou kurinosuke:
what do you mean by engine ? Is there such a thing in Ajax ?

http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2006/01/ajax-back-button.html?page=last

[Nimchi Yung]

Brett,

Thanks for the info. I use Java exclusively at work. Don't know much
about C# and PHP. I like to follow book examples by deploying the application
to a web server.

Your examples do look cute. I guess I will drop by my local book store
and check it out. I do enjoy other Head-First books.

Thanks,
Nimchi

[suresh koutam]

after reading what you guys said that AJAX will be used with javascript on the client side, i have a question. Iwhen i was working in one of the clinet sides they asked us to saty away from javascript as it has to be enabled by the user and sometime internet browsers may not support (old versions). If this is the case how do you think this will be beneficial to a person who likes to use AJAX without using the java script?

the other question i have is why to build softwares that depend on other softwares. we simply take the others burden and carry around. Is it not better to make changes to the old one or replace that one with the new one.

any answers?

[Eric Pascarello]

Originally posted by suresh koutam:
after reading what you guys said that AJAX will be used with javascript on the client side, i have a question. Iwhen i was working in one of the clinet sides they asked us to saty away from javascript as it has to be enabled by the user and sometime internet browsers may not support (old versions). If this is the case how do you think this will be beneficial to a person who likes to use AJAX without using the java script?

the other question i have is why to build softwares that depend on other softwares. we simply take the others burden and carry around. Is it not better to make changes to the old one or replace that one with the new one.

any answers?

Before posting new questions look around:
https://coderanch.com/t/117882/HTML-JavaScript/AJAX-without-Javascript

Discussion on JavaScript and Ajax is already started.

Eric