Chapter 12. Ajax and RIAs with ASP.NET 4.0
This chapter covers
In chapter 11, you learned how to take full control over the markup generated by your pages. Be sure you’re comfortable with the contents of that chapter because it might affect the subjects in this chapter.
In this chapter, we’re going to turn our attention to Ajax. Nowadays, everybody knows about it. Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. The term was coined in 2005; since then, it’s become the de facto standard for the web. With Ajax, also came new terms like RIA (Rich Internet Application) and the famous Web 2.0.
Though the term Web 2.0 is a marketing creation, Ajax and RIA are an authentic revolution in terms of user interface and usability. Even though Ajax doesn’t introduce any new technology, it has established a pattern to better reuse the existing ones.
RIAs are a different beast. The term RIA identifies an application that enables a rich interface with fluent interaction. Although with Ajax it’s perfectly possible to create an RIA, it would require a huge amount of work. A lot of JavaScript has been born to ease RIA development.