Chapter 9. Ajax and WhatWhat Status Projects

In This Chapter

• 9.1 Handling Ajax Requests 134

• 9.2 Digging Into the Project Controller Methods 137

• 9.3 A First Look at project.kid 141

• 9.4 Summary 146

You want to do dynamic Ajax-enabled web 2.0 projects, do you?

Well, we've got them. If you've been living under a rock for the past 18 months, you might not have heard of Ajax. No technology is perfect, but Ajax has definitely become an important technology to know and use. It can make your web applications faster and more responsive.

Ajax is most useful when it enables you to create more responsive user-friendly applications by using asynchronous requests from within a page. This can make your applications easier to use. But it can be kind of disconcerting when things on your page start magically appearing or disappearing. And that's where one of the most user visible parts of the whole Ajax world comes in: visual effects.

In this chapter, we explore the way that WhatWhat Status uses visual effects to make the project's pages more dynamic and easier to use.