I started as a Web Developer in 1996, and quicky found the wonders of JavaScript, and has since been doing tons of stuff with it. When doing more complex stuff it has always been an issue of how to get the code to communicate between client and server, as well as between frames and what have you.. In the beginning we had to use hidden frames and iframes to send data back and forth, without reloading the main window. But one of the best features for doing that has only been widely used for 3-4 years in cross-browser enviroments (IE 5.0 introduced it). It’s the XMLHttpRequest API which allows the client to send and recieve XML documents thru ordinary HTTP GET & POST methods. The IO is handled asyncronously and uses events calls to inform the client of the status.

This introduction was taken from the pages of my own AJAX API, which I am releasing very soon, stay tuned!!

WarpXML 2.0 - AJAX on Steriods.

Oh, well you can’t mention ‘em all except one, so here’s the AJAX / browser UI toolkit briefly mentioned in the previous post. I haven’t tried this or any of the other mentioned Ajax API’s because I have written my own a long time before all this Ajax talk, I won’t promise when I’ll release it, because it seems I have to evaluate the feature sets of quite a number of api’s first.. One’s api has to be superior ofcourse (Seriously I will probably go for a multi-layered architecture, attempting to base a complex Ajax core upon a low-level core, allowing for the many uses XML data has on a website)..

* Dojo Toolkit

In this seemingly unlimited stream of AJAX articles and frameworks, let me present you to SACK. SACK is a light-weight AJAX API, written by Gregory Wild-Smith.

Gregory writes: “I’ve seen AJAX solutions like SAJAX or Dojo, and they haven’t really interested me. They seem to bloated and, for the most part, rather insecure.
This is mostly because they appear to be trying to do things with AJAX that it can do, but should it?“

* Sack of AJAX
* AJAX - We fear change
* Shiny New Sack
* AJAX : Whiter than White?

* Simple AJAX Code-Kit (SACK) Docs

I have not had time to evaluate this framework, but I have come across it the last couple of days, so I might as well post a note about, to get you started on this.

* In not too distant future I will be releasing my own XML frameworks as Open Source (most probably CC-GNU GPL), I just thought I would like to update them a little first, since they were mainly written in 2002.

“Sajax is an open source tool to make programming websites using the Ajax framework — also known as XMLHTTPRequest or remote scripting — as easy as possible. Sajax makes it easy to call PHP, Perl or Python functions from your webpages via JavaScript without performing a browser refresh. The toolkit does 99% of the work for you so you have no excuse to not use it.“

* SAJAX - Simple Ajax Toolkit by ModernMethod - XMLHTTPRequest Toolkit

Thomas Baekdal writes about the usability issues of XML/JS/HTML or these days just AJAX.

* Usability issues with XMLHttpRequest.

* Usable XMLHttpRequest in Practice