Crossing borders: Ajax on Rails

Crossing borders: Ajax on Rails Why Ajax works so well with Ruby Level: Intermediate Bruce Tate (bruce.tate@j2life.com), President, RapidRed 05 Dec 2006 The hype for Ajax, a technique for making Web pages more interactive, is in overdrive. The Ruby on Rails framework is also flourishing, partly on the strength of its excellent Ajax integration. Find out what makes Ajax on Rails such a powerful combination. The previous two Crossing borders articles (see Resources) walked you through Streamlined, a Rails add-on

that makes effective use of scaffolding to generate simple, Ajax-enabled user interfaces quickly. Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you recognize Ajax as a programming technique that uses XML, JavaScript, and Web standards to create highly interactive Web pages, such as those you'll find at Google Maps and hundreds of other sites. Several readers of the Streamlined articles asked me to describe the way Ajax works on Ruby on Rails. This article walks through a couple of simple Ajax examples and, along the way, shows you what makes the Ruby/Ajax combination so successful. In the next article in this series, I'll dig into JavaScript as a programming language. Ajax defined Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML. Jesse James Garrett, an information architect, came up with the term in 2005 to describe a technique that had seen niche use for nearly a decade (see Resources ). Ajax use then exploded, with a simultaneous growth in libraries, popular Web sites, and literature. Ajax redefines the basic browser's usage model, which was to render a page at a time. Ajax lets the browser communicate with the server between page updates. The upside is a richer user experience, at the cost of...

Website: www.balearsinnovacio.com | Filesize: 271kb
No of Page(s): 7
Download Crossing borders: Ajax on Rails.pdf