AJAX In Action [5]
We’re standing on the shoulders of a whole group of giants here. The view is fantastic.
DAVE CRANE
I’d like to thank Chia, Ben, and Sophie for their support, wisdom, and enthusiasm, and for putting up with me through all the late nights and early mornings. I’m finished now and I promise to behave. Thanks too to my parents for listening to the book-writing saga unfold and for instilling in me the strength and foolishness to undertake such a project in the first place.
Eric and Darren have been excellent co-authors to work with, and I’d like to extend my thanks to them too, for their invaluable contributions to the book. My thanks to my colleagues at Smartstream Technologies for exploring the world of Ajax with me before it was christened—Tony Coombes, John Kellett, Phil McCarthy, Anthony Warner, Jon Green, Rob Golder, David Higgins, Owen ReesHayward, Greg Nwosu, Hristo Gramatikov, and Stuart Martin, and to my managers Colin Reid and Andrew Elmore. Thanks too to our colleagues overseas: Bhupendra, Pooja, Rahul, Dhiraj, Josef, Vjeko and Ted, and to the many other talented people with whom I’ve had the pleasure to work over the years. Special thanks are due to Rodrigo Barnes for introducing me to this new programming Licensed to jonathan zheng ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xxiii language called “Java” ten years ago, and to my brother Mike for figuring out how to drive our BBC microcomputer. ERIC PASCARELLO I would like to thank Shona, my wife, for putting up with the late nights and for planning our wedding without my help, while I wrote this book. Thanks to my parents for letting me become a computer nerd. Thanks to my co-workers Fred Grau, Paul Fuseyamore, Tim Stanton, Tracey Baker, Adrienne Cantler, and Kelly Singleton for putting up with my early morning grumpiness after the long nights of writing. Thanks to the people at www.JavaRanch.com for their support and many great ideas. And I cannot forget to thank the aliens who abducted me and taught me to program. DARREN JAMES I would like to thank my wife, Alana, and my children, Hannah and Paul, for being my life’s inspiration. Thanks to my parents for encouraging me to do well in school; to my colleague and friend, Bill Scott, for his ideas and support; to Richard Cowin and the contributors to Rico; to Butch Clarke for being an anchor in the storm; and to Gordon, Junior, and Jub-Jub for making me laugh. Licensed to jonathan zheng about this book Ajax is a growing new technology at the time of this writing and we’re delighted to bring you the lowdown on it, in the inimitable style of Manning’s In Action series. In doing so, though, we faced an interesting problem. Although Ajax is indisputably hot, it isn’t really new. It isn’t really a technology, either. Let us explain. Ajax brings together several well-established web technologies and uses them in new and interesting ways. Learning to use a completely new technology for the first time is in some ways simpler because you start with a blank slate. Ajax is different: there is also much to unlearn. Because of this, our book is organized somewhat differently from most Manning In Action books. You may notice this when reading and should know that we feel the way it is organized best suits this subject. And, as you will see, although the Ajax technologies themselves are all client side, the differences extend all the way down to the server. This book is mainly about client-side programming, and most of the code examples that you’ll find in here are JavaScript.