he phrase AJAX is getting all the attention lately. By now, you should already be familiar with the term, but for those of you still in the dark, AJAX represents techniques to build responsive and feature-rich Web applications. Instead of constantly waiting for web pages to refresh, AJAX-enabled Web sites dynamically update portions of the pages, thus providing a much more responsive user experience to the user. What's more, with AJAX you can now develop feature-rich applications through the Web browser. Just take a look at
http://local.live.com/ and
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ to experience the wonders of AJAX.
While the technologies AJAX uses are all in the public domain (XML, HTTP and Javascript), developers would be more efficient with the help of a ready framework with which to get started. Not surprisingly, Microsoft has been working on just such a framework—called Atlas (
http://atlas.asp.net/ ). To be more specific, Atlas is a free framework that allows ASP.NET 2.0 developers to build AJAX-style Web applications.
In this article, I will show you how you can use Atlas to build responsive Web applications and vastly improved user interfaces. As usual, I will walk you through a case study, and hopefully get you jumpstarted on Atlas programming.
AJAX (and in this case, Atlas) programming generally involves using client-side scripts (such as JavaScript) to dynamically modify the content of a page or to send data asynchronously to and from the Web server. To ease the development effort, the Atlas architecture contains two main components:
- Client components—a set of client script libraries (.js files) that define a layered approach for creating client-based applications.
- Server components—server-based components, services, and controls that can be integrated with 'Atlas' client scripts.
This article will focus on the Atlas server components.
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