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Whether you're a system administrator, a designer, or a developer, your job will be significantly affected by AJAX. Administrators have to ensure that the security bar is still high enough to face new types of possible attacks. Intranet administrators have to guarantee that JavaScript is not disabled on any browsers. Web designers have new challenges to pursue due to features attainable with AJAX that were once impossible or impractical. And developers have a new API and a new overall approach to programming to become familiar with. All that said, what does AJAX mean for architects?

AJAX applications are challenging because they introduce brand-new concepts and a new foundation. The role of the architect is essential because the AJAX paradigm straddles both the client and the server environments. A clear architectural vision is critical for determining what logic and processing happens on the client and what remains on the server, as well as what data objects the client and the server are able to exchange.

An article on AJAX, providing back button and bookmark functionality in a simplified class. Written in JavaScript, demonstrated in ASP.NET and can be used with any server-side scripting language.

A remote task is a piece of code that executes on the server in response to a client event. There are three possible ways for an ASP.NET AJAX client page to trigger a remote task: by causing a postback managed by an UpdatePanel control, by invoking a method directly on the application’s back end exposed through a local Web service, and by using a page method. Soon there will be a fourth method: a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service..

How to build a more intuitive ListBox server control with ASP.NET AJAX client functionality.

When consuming things like long web services or RSS feeds from external web sources, it might be nice to load all of the important parts on the page first and then load the slower loading part(s) later. This example will demonstrate how to load multiple blocks of RSS headlines after the main body of the page has had a chance to load. While the page is loading, placeholders are displayed to indicate that additional content is coming. After the page loads, the content for the placeholders is retrieved and displayed asynchronously.

Oftentimes, there can be a need to load something on a page that may take significantly longer to load than the rest of the page. In some cases, you can use caching to help with this issue, but it may not always be possible or be the only option. If something is going to take longer to load than normal, it is important to display some kind of visual feedback to the user so that they know to wait while something is happening. Retrieving information from a remote server, displaying large sets of data, and photo galleries are just a few examples where delaying the loading of specific content areas would be useful.

This is an article on how to use Rating control from AjaxControlToolkit and create CSS and images to display it as a gauge or thermometer. It is useful for those who need to show ratings in ASP.NET more graphically.

In the current sample of the project, I used the AJAX development approach to dynamically display and interact with the information presented. I decided to couple the JavaScript Grid and Web Service from my previous articles. This article shows how it's simple to use my JavaScript Grid along with AJAX on client side. Since the client and server code were done, all that I needed to do is to couple it into one application. It is pretty simple to introduce the Grid into a web application..

Don't want to use the new Microsoft AJAX quite yet? There are other plenty of other good (and easy) alternatives! This article will demonstrate how to use a popular JavaScript library (jQuery) to add AJAX capabilities to your application with a minimal amount of code.

When users of any computer application start a potentially lengthy operation, best practices dictate that the user interface should be updated to indicate that work is in progress and that results may not be available for a while. This is easy to accomplish in a desktop application, but it can be rather difficult in a Web scenario. In Web applications, displaying text such as "Please wait" just before an operation begins is easy, but if you want to provide some useful feedback, such as the estimated time to completion or the percentage of work finished, it’s a bit more difficult to accomplish. This is because most lengthy tasks in Web apps execute on the server, and there are no built-in mechanisms for pushing state information to the client.

In this month’s column, I build a server and client ASP.NET AJAX infrastructure to start and control a potentially lengthy server-side task.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML are now the needed for new generation websites. This article describes how to implement ASP.NET Ajax into applications.