Chapter 20. Ajax Programming

The free thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

Matthew Arnold

Gone are the days when a Web application could be architected and implemented as a collection of static and dynamic pages served from the server for each and every request. In today’s Web, a lot of work is done on the client using JavaScript libraries or richer engines such as Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight.

Having rich client-side functionality is no longer a brilliant exception as it was only a few years ago; this is now going to be the rule. On the other hand, what’s your knee-jerk reaction when you run across a Web site that requires you to pick up an item from a drop-down list and refreshes the entire page afterward? More or less, ...

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