Professional Ajax, 2nd Edition

13.4. Summary

This chapter introduced you to the concept of Ajax frameworks. Where Ajax libraries are primarily client-side objects designed to ease Ajax communication, frameworks provide support for both the client and server sides of Ajax communication. The libraries covered in this chapter all provide developers with an automated way of creating JavaScript wrappers for corresponding server objects. These wrappers include cross-browser Ajax communication that is completely abstracted away from the developer's view.

Next, you were introduced to open source Ajax frameworks for each of the three major web application servers. The first framework covered was JPSpan, an Ajax framework for PHP. Next, Direct Web Remoting (DWR) was introduced as an Ajax framework for JSP. Last, Ajax.NET Professional was discussed as an Ajax framework for ASP.NET.

The same example was used for each of these frameworks so that you could see the similarities and differences among the three. Each framework uses reflection to inspect server-side objects and create appropriate JavaScript wrappers for those objects. As with most open source projects, these frameworks may very well change in the future or be discontinued, so choose your framework carefully.