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The Next Big Thing

By Allen Holub

February 1, 2006 — (Page 1 of 2)
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that AJAX seems to be the next big thing. AJAX is not really a technology at all, however—it’s a technique. I’ve been using it in my most recent project, and here are my experiences.

The basic premise of AJAX is to move all the presentation-layer code from the server to the browser. The server presents two types of information to the browser: generic Web pages that contain no data and data streams that contain the information displayed on these pages. That is, instead of creating custom Web pages, the server produces custom data sets for stock Web pages. The data can be sent using XML, but in the application that I’m building, I’ve found that it’s not worth the trouble. I’m just sending comma-separated lists.

At the heart of AJAX is a single JavaScript function call: xmlHttpRequest(). In spite of the name, this is not an XML-related function at all. It simply issues an HTTP GET or POST, and returns the data returned by the browser. On the server side, these requests are handled by standard servlets running under Tomcat. (The Web pages that contain the xmlHttpRequest call are served by Apache, and there’s no need to connect Apache and Tomcat with ModJK since Tomcat isn’t actually serving Web pages—it’s just creating data streams. Tomcat and Apache can be running on separate machines.)

Since it’s JavaScript, you can’t just call xmlHttpRequest, though. The function’s behavior is browser-dependent. Fortunately, you can create a function that wraps the hideous garbage needed to make the function call work.

I found a few useful descriptions of how to make xmlHttpRequest actually work at developer.apple.com/internet/webcontent/xmlhttpreq.html,jibbering.com/2002/4/httprequest.html, www.omnytex.com/articles/xhrstruts (which describe how to use an xmlHttpRequest with Struts), and www.xml.com/lpt/a/2005/02/09/xml-http-request.html. There’s also a really useful set of detailed AJAX examples at www.clearnova.com/ajax.

In my application, all I was doing with Ajax was flowing different chunks of HTML into a <div> element based on user input. Since this is pretty basic JavaScript programming, which I already knew how to do, just figuring out how to make the xmlHttpRequest call was all that I needed. The servlets that responded to the request were trivial to write.

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