Appendix D. Building web applications with JavaScript
This appendix discusses how to use the new CMIS 1.1 Browser binding with JavaScript code, and provides hands-on examples to demonstrate some basic concepts. Hold on tight; the pace will be very fast. If we explained all the background along the way, this appendix could take an entire book on its own. For that reason, we’re assuming you already know HTML, Ajax, and JavaScript for this high-speed survey of the subject.
Over the last few years, rich web applications have become more and more popular. Several factors are influencing this trend. The invention of the asynchronous JavaScript plus XML (Ajax) technologies in the late 1990s laid the foundation to overcome the traditional request-response scheme, where each action on a web page resulted in a new HTML page being delivered to the browser. Instead, now you can build web applications that behave more like desktop applications by changing only parts of a web page and manipulating the DOM tree on the fly. A second trend has been the enormous progress in JavaScript technology in web browsers over the last few years. The evolution from primitive language interpreters to highly optimized on-the-fly compilation has made it possible to build a new generation of browser applications that formerly were restricted to the desktop, such as inbrowser games.