[thelist] AJAX Tip

[David Kaufman]

Christian Heilmann <codepo8 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hershel Robinson wote:
>> Just saw this today:
>> http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/
>
> Steady on! Lightbox is a very cool script, no doubt, but it has
> nothing to do with AJAX, let's not confuse matters.
>
> AJAX means using XMLHTTPRequest to talk to the server, all lightbox
> does is load an image.


if you view the source on that page, notice:

 <script src="js/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
 <script src="js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects" 
type="text/javascript"></script>
 <script src="js/lightbox.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

The Prototype [http://prototype.conio.net/] and Scriptaculous 
[http://script.aculo.us/] (which extends Prototype) are certainly the on 
the cutting edge of free, open source, standards-compliant and 
cross-browser AJAX capable Javascript libraries.

They also include lots of advanced (and cool) DOM visual effects, which 
may or may not be used with XmlHttpRequest or XML data, so if (and I 
haven't checked) his lightbox.js does actually *use* those two other 
libraries, I'd certainly characterize it as "Web 2.0" even if it's 
neither strictly asynchronous nor using any actual xml data... :-)

-dave