Chapter 13. Building stand-alone applications with Ajax
This chapter covers
- Handling RSS feeds
- Ajax for accessing websites directly
- Ajax without a server
- Fade-in, fade-out
In the last four chapters, we’ve developed a range of neat Ajax applications and shown the client-side and server-side code for each. In this chapter, we don’t need to present you with any server-side code, because we’re not going to write any. This may come as a surprise to most people, but we can run Ajax applications directly against any web server-based stream of data, including those that are generated by third-party applications. We can develop a rich user interface for a web page that acts like a client application.
Many websites offer XML feeds in the formats of Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Resource Descriptor Framework (RDF), or Atom, which are the three most common syndication feeds that we see. The information contained in these syndication feeds can be daily news articles, comics, weblogs (blogs), jokes, weather, and so on. With Ajax we have the ability to get the syndication information without having to visit these websites or buy a client application that will read the XML syndication feeds on our computers.
In this chapter, we develop our own client application, an XML reader that obtains feeds from various websites. It can be run in the browser on any computer that has an active Internet connection.