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Beginning Ajax with ASP.NET
Read an excerpt:
Chapter 1: Introduction to Ajax on ASP.NET
Excerpt provided courtesy of John Wiley & Sons Inc. Copyright © John Wiley & Sons Inc. Written permission from the publisher is required for any use of this material.
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Ajax has the power to revolutionize the way web-based applications are designed.
This book provides you with a thorough working knowledge of what Ajax has to
offer and how to take full advantage of it in your application development.
Following an exploration of how Ajax works with .NET, you'll get acquainted
with DHTML, the role of JavaScript and the Document Object Model, and the XMLHttpRequest
Object, which is the foundation of Ajax. Then you will examine the Ajax-type
features built into ASP.NET and explore the Ajax.NET Professional Library in
detail. Finally, you will explore client scripting as well as building and using
controls with Microsoft's Atlas. With an entire chapter devoted to debugging,
you will have all you need to use this cutting-edge technology.
What you will learn from this book
* What you can do with the open source Ajax.NET Professional Library
* How to use the corresponding functionality, Asynchronous Client Script Callbacks,
that comes with ASP.NET 2.0
* Techniques for using the XMLHttpRequest Object to communicate between the
client web browser and the server
* An overview of XML, XSLT, and other ways to send data between client and server
* How to integrate Microsoft's Atlas with many of the services available in
ASP.NET 2.0
Who this book is for
This book is for programmers who use ASP.NET and are just starting to use Ajax
technologies to create more responsive, modern applications.
Wrox Beginning guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and
technologies easier than you think, providing a structured, tutorial format
that will guide you through all the techniques involved.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments.
Introduction.
Chapter 1: Introduction to Ajax on ASP.NET.
Chapter 2: Introduction to DHTML.
Chapter 3: JavaScript and the Document Object Model.
Chapter 4: The XMLHttpRequest Object.
Chapter 5: Data Communication: XML, XSLT, and JSON.
Chapter 6: What Is Built into ASP.NET.
Chapter 7: Ajax.NET Professional Library.
Chapter 8: Anatomy of Ajax.NET Pro Library.
Chapter 9: Other Ajax Frameworks for .NET.
Chapter 10: Atlas Client Script.
Chapter 11: Atlas Controls.
Chapter 12: Atlas Integration with ASP.NET Services.
Chapter 13: Debugging.
Appendix A: XSLT Commands.
Index.
About the Authors
Wallace B. "Wally" McClure graduated from the Georgia Institute
of Technology in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering.
He continued his education there, receiving a master’s degree in the same
field in 1991. Since that time, he has done consulting and development for such
organizations as The United States Department of Education, Coca-Cola, Bechtel
National, Magnatron, and Lucent Technologies, among others. Products and services
have included work with ASP, ADO, XML, and SQL Server, as well as numerous applications
in the Microsoft .NET Framework. Wally has been working with the .NET Framework
since the summer of 2000. Wally McClure specializes in building applications
that have large numbers of users and large amounts of data. He is a Microsoft
MVP and an ASPInsider, and a partner in Scalable Development, Inc. You can read
Wally’s blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/wallym.
Wally and coauthor Paul Glavich also co-host the ASP.NET Podcast. You can listen
to it at www.aspnetpodcast.com. In addition, Wally travels around the southeast
United States doing user group talks and sessions at various CodeCamps.
When not working or playing with technology, Wally tries to spend time with
his wife Ronda and their two children, Kirsten and Bradley. Occasionally, Wally
plays golf and on July 30, 2005, broke par on a real golf course for the first
time in his life. If he hadn’t been there, he would not have believed it.
Scott Cate is the President of myKB.com, Inc., in Scottsdale, Arizona.
myKB.com, Inc., is a technology company specializing in commercial ASP.NET applications.
His product line includes myKB.com (knowledge base software), kbAlertz.com (Microsoft
knowledge base notifications), and EasySearchASP.net (a pluggable search engine
for ASP.NET sites). Scott also runs AZGroups.com (Arizona .NET user groups),
one of the largest and most active user group communities in the country, and
is a member of ASPInsiders.com, a group devoted to giving early feedback to
the Microsoft ASP.NET team. In addition, Scott has coauthored the novel Surveillance,
which can be found at http://surveillance-the-novel.com.
Paul Glavich is currently an ASP.NET MVP and works as a senior technical
consultant for Readify. He has over 15 years of industry experience ranging
from PICK, C, C++, Delphi, and Visual Basic 3/4/5/6 to his current specialty
in .NET C++ with C#, COM+, and ASP.NET. Paul has been developing in .NET technologies
since .NET was first in beta and was technical architect for one of the world’s
first Internet banking solutions using .NET technology. Paul can be seen on
various .NET related newsgroups, has presented at the Sydney .NET user group
(www.sdnug.org) and is also a board member of ASPInsiders (www.aspinsiders.com).
He has also written some technical articles that can be seen on community sites,
such as ASPAlliance.com (www.aspalliance.com).
On a more personal note, Paul is married with three children and two grandkids,
and holds a third degree black belt in budo-jitsu.
Craig Shoemaker can’t sit still. As the host of the Polymorphic
Podcast (polymorphicpodcast.com), Craig teaches on topics as timely as software
architecture and as cutting edge as the latest Ajax technologies. Whether he’s
writing for CoDe Magazine, ASPAlliance, or DotNetJunkies or speaking at local
user groups, Southern California Code Camp, or VSLive!, Craig loves to share
his passion for the art and science for software development. Craig is also
a full-time software engineer for Microsoft Certified Partner PDSA, Inc. (pdsa.com)
in Tustin, California.
Customer Reviews
Customer Reviews: 1 Average Customer Rating: Dec 7, 2006
Great Beginning AJAX Book
This book is intended for web application developers who want to build highly interactive applications and are just beginning to look at Ajax. Many people have heard of Ajax but few understand how to write applications using this technology. This is where the book - Beginning Ajax with ASP.NET comes in. This WROX publication, explains what Ajax is, what are the benefits of using Ajax and how would you use it.
Ajax is built on existing web technologies such as HTML, CSS, the DOM, JavaScript and XML. The book begins with an overview of these technologies before going on to discuss the key component of Ajax, the XMLHttpRequest object in detail. Various popular Ajax frameworks have been reviewed and contrasts drawn, starting with the Ajax functionality built into ASP.net 2.0 itself. The final section of the book covers Microsofts Atlas in some detail. The book ends with an often overlooked topic debugging.
Some Beginner books do not go into enough detail to be useful and some are so verbose that the central theme of the book is lost in the verbiage. The authors of this book for the most part avoid these pitfalls and strike the right balance. There is a basic assumption that the reader is familiar to some extent with .Net particularly ASP.net. There are plenty of code samples, good references and illustrations through out the book.
There are 13 chapters in the book that can be grouped into the following sections. The first section (Chapters 1-3) introduces the underlying technologies, the history of Ajax and who is using it now (Google Suggest any one?). There are examples that show event driven dynamic updates of elements on a web page (DHTML) and the object oriented programming aspects of JavaScript.
At the heart of Ajax is the XMLHttpRequest object which facilitates the actual asynchronous requests to the server. Chapter 4 goes into great detail on the topic and leads you by the hand through code examples. This discussion is followed by an overview of the common data exchange formats XML and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) in the next chapter and what are the benefits of one over the other. Given that XML (and XSLT) is a big topic in itself, the authors wisely point to references and an appendix at the end of the book for more details while only touching on the topic in the chapter.
The mid section of the book focuses on the popular Ajax frameworks for ASP.net, starting with the open source Ajax.net Pro framework for ASP.net. The discussion on the frameworks is prefaced by a look at the asynchronous client script callback interface in ASP.NET 2.0. This interface which is a wrapper around the XmlHttpRequest object provides the seamless asynchronous communication between a client and server. Some controls in ASP.net 2.0 such as GridView, TreeView and DetailsView have built in support for asynchronous client script callbacks. While other controls and the page itself can implement the interface and support asynchronous client script callbacks. There is a good illustration in this chapter that shows the entire sequence of the asynchronous callback mechanism between the client and server.
Ajax frameworks for ASP.net provide libraries that obviate the need for a lot of application code, and handle cross browser incompatibilities and differing implementations of the XmlHttpRequest object. There are two types of frameworks client side and server side. The book does a high level review of the three client side frameworks Sarissa, HTMLHttpRequest and MochiKit and three server side frameworks ComfortASP.NET, MagicAjax and Anthem.NET. Each framework is explored using code and the benefits and drawbacks are highlighted. Ajax.net Pro framework is covered in most detail with a peek at the internals, which is an interesting read.
The final few chapters focus on Microsofts Atlas technology - the client scripting, controls and integration with ASP.net services. The book references the March CTP and by the time of the RTM, some of the information may have very well changed, so it would be wise to check the references closer to the release. However for now, the exploration is pretty thorough. Atlass Ajax framework is a client side framework.
The final chapter deals with debugging, and talks about tools for various browsers. There is even mention of Fiddler, which lets you see your response/requests data streaming across the wire nice!!
In conclusion, this is a good book for a beginner learning about Ajax. This is a pragmatic book, with code samples and illustrations in every chapter following every concept introduced. Some of the examples could have been more robust however that this is minor issue given that there is a lot of useful information and references and emphasis on standards even in the simplest examples.
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