Chapter 13. Ajax Frameworks

Up to this point, the examples and discussions in the book have focused on writing every piece of functionality for both client and server. You may have noticed that there can be a fair amount of repetition between examples, code being duplicated and altered only slightly to produce a different result. It is undoubtedly innefficient for numerous developers to be writing the same code over and over again. The identifyication of these common threads in Ajax solutions has given rise to several frameworks that aim to allow rapid development of Ajax applications by freeing the developer from programming low-level communication between client and server.

The frameworks covered in this chapter are known as remote invocation frameworks, meaning that the framework is responsible for generating client-side JavaScript that abstracts out the XMLHttp communication, parameter passing, and response handling. Fortunately, there are frameworks available for each of the three major application server technologies: PHP, JSP, and ASP.NET.