Chapter 14. Ajax and Client Scripting

ASP.NET MVC is first and foremost a server-side technology. It's an extremely flexible framework for handling HTTP requests and generating HTML responses. But HTML alone is static—it only updates each time the browser loads a new page—so by itself it can't deliver a rich interactive user experience. To manipulate the HTML document object model (DOM) directly in the browser, or to break free of the traditional full-page request-response cycle, you need some kind of programming technology that runs inside the browser (i.e., on the client side).

There's never been a shortage of client-side technologies. For example, we've had JavaScript, Flash, Flex, Air, VBScript, ActiveX, Java applets, HTC files, XUL, and of ...

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