10-Week Free AJAX Programming Online Course

Devin Rychetnik — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 22:47:00 GMT

Course Abstract

The Web is going through the second wave of its evolution and some people call it Web 2.0. Whether Web 2.0 is considered a hype or not, there are indeed a set of concrete technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) that make the Web of today a lot more interactive, responsive, exciting and useful than it used to be.

This workshop starts with a lecture and a hands-on lab in which the basic concept of AJAX and the core technologies - JavaScript, CSS, DOM, and XMLHttpRequest - that make up the AJAX are discussed and exercised. The workflow of AJAX operation is also discussed in detail using an example code.

In production environment, it is likely that you would use one or combination of various AJAX toolkits and frameworks. The majority part of the workshop is dedicated to discussing key frameworks and toolkits that are available today for building AJAX applications. These include

Client-side JavaScript toolkit such as Dojo toolkit, which hides the low-level processing of XMLHttpRequest
DWR (Direct Web Remoting), which enables RMI-like invocation from the JavaScript client code to backend Java class
AJAX-enabled JSF components which allows you to build AJAX applications by drag-and-dropping UI components
Wrapper technology such as jMaki that lets you use AJAX widgets from different sources using common interface
Java to JavaScript translator technology such as Google Web Toolkit (GWT)
Existing Web application frameworks with AJAX extensions such as Wicket, Echo2 or Shale

Finally, the AJAX development tools such as JavaScript debugger (especially FireBug), DOM inspector, logging tool are discussed. Each lecture is followed by a hands-on lab session. The hands-on labs use NetBeans IDE 5.0 or 5.5 beta.

(This description and more information on how to sign up can be found at http://www.javapassion.com/ajaxcodecamp/.

If my evenings weren't already full with computer course studies, I would take it myself. Hopefully, one of you out there reading this can do it and share the highlights with those of us who aren't so fortunate.

Jump on the AJAX Bandwagon

Devin Rychetnik — Sat, 13 May 2006 00:36:00 GMT

So it seems that pretty much everyone has decided to release some sort of AJAX framework.

Microsoft: http://atlas.asp.net/

Sun: https://ajax.dev.java.net/

Adobe: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/

Google: http://goog-ajaxslt.sourceforge.net/

Yahoo: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

UPDATE (20 May 2006): There's more

Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/java/ajax.html

Google (a more comparable one this time): http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

Tibco: http://www.tibco.com/software/ria/gi_resource_center.jsp