AJAX: fast mastery for experienced Web developers!

Already an experienced Web developer? Apply your skills in today’s fastest-growing area of Web development: AJAX!

Building on what you already know, this fast-paced guide will show you exactly how to create rich, usable Internet applications. Joshua Eichorn teaches through sophisticated code examples, including extensive server-side PHP code.

You won’t just learn how to code AJAX applications: Eichorn covers the entire development lifecycle, from use cases and design through debugging. He also presents detailed application case studies, including a start-to-finish update of a non-AJAX application that addresses everything from feature improvements to changing usage patterns. Coverage includes:

·       How AJAX changes the conventional Web development cycle

·       Problems created by the AJAX paradigm -- and how to avoid them

·       Adding AJAX to existing Web applications: key considerations

·       Using core AJAX technologies, including the XMLHttpRequest object

·       Consuming data returned to an AJAX application using both XSLT and JSON

·       Building more usable AJAX applications: guidelines and downloadable resources

·       Use cases: solving real-world problems in the AJAX environment

·       Libraries and toolkits for simplifying AJAX development, including Sarissa, scriptaculous, and HTML_AJAX

·       A complete guide to AJAX debugging

·       Supporting browsers without XMLHttpRequest by using IFrames or cookies

·       JSON data encoding debugging guide, which covers tools for Firefox and Internet Explorer

·       A list of libraries, which includes PHP, .NET, Java, and other libraries that can be used with any server language

Joshua Eichorn, senior architect for Uversa, has developed custom solutions that have incorporated AJAX concepts since before the term “AJAX” was coined. He has more than six years’ experience with Open Source projects, and created phpDocumentor, the #1 PHP documentation solution. He is currently lead maintainer of the HTML_AJAX PHP PEAR library, and helps to run the Phoenix, Arizona PHP Users Group. His blog, There and Back Again (blog.joshuaeichorn.com) , focuses on AJAX and PHP innovations.