Simplifying JavaScript

Chapter 9Access External Data

In the 19th century, an international team of engineers embarked on one of the greatest engineering challenges of their day: laying a telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean. The project took several failed attempts and plenty of money and hours before it succeeded. In the end, you could send a message from Europe to the United States in an impressive 17 hours—much faster than the nearly two-week boat trip it used to take.

Fast communication can mean the difference between success and failure. JavaScript’s resurgence is partially due to the fact that you can load a page once and then use JavaScript for all future communications to and from servers. Suddenly, you could experience websites as actual software ...