Introducing Ajax

Summary

In this chapter, you got a brief history lesson on the methodologies for building user interfaces to servers that process your data and on the constantly swinging pendulum from thin client to fat client. You were brought up to date on what the newest trend in this development is—web-based thin clients with rich functionality thanks to the asynchrony delivered by the XMLHttpRequest object. This object is the core of Ajax, and in this chapter you built a simple demonstration that used it. This example was straightforward and barely scratched the surface of what you can do with Ajax; however, it demonstrated one of the drawbacks of using this methodology, namely, that it is heavy on the scripting. JavaScript, although powerful, is difficult and onerous to debug and manage when compared to languages such as C#, VB .NET, and Java. As such, the application benefits you receive by using an Ajax approach may be nullified by the application development getting bogged down in thousands (or more) lines of JavaScript.

It is with this problem in mind that Microsoft is attempting to bring the productivity of ASP.NET with Visual Studio 2005 to the Ajax space, and thus Atlas was born. In the next chapter, you’ll be introduced to the wonderful world of Atlas, you will look at the architecture of it, you will learn how it allows you to use Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 controls to generate client-side code from server-side controls, and you will see how this can give you the best of Ajax while avoiding the worst of it.