JBoss® Seam: Simplicity and Power Beyond Java™ EE

15. Custom and AJAX UI Components

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is a rich web UI approach pioneered by Google. The term itself was coined by Jesse James Garret of Adaptive Path in 2005. The idea is to use JavaScript to retrieve dynamic content from the server and then update related UI components in the web page without refreshing the entire page. For instance, on a Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/) web page, you can use the mouse to move and zoom the map without page reload. The map display page captures the user’s mouse events via JavaScript and then makes AJAX calls back to the server to retrieve new maps to display based on the mouse event. The user simply sees that the map gets updated as she moves the mouse. Another well-known ...