Like many of us, I never learned the JavaScript formally but started dabbling in it, using a similar-looking language (Java) as base for my coding style. Here’s another feature that seems quite simple but it took me a while to realize how powerful it really is because of my Java bias. In Java or .Net, information about an object can be gathered and generic operations executed at runtime via a mechanism called Reflection. Since it adds a certain overhead and is cumbersome to code, it is used rarely in everyday code (although frameworks like Spring frequently use it internally). In JavaScript, on the other hand, it’s not only very easy to discover object details at runtime and perform operations in a generic way, but it’s even possible to add and remove object properties themselves.

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JavaScript has become one of my favorite languages. It is extremely flexible and powerful. It is not hard picking up the basics if you have programmed Java or C# before. But there are many features that are very hard to emulate or simply not possible in those languages. One example is the Function object’s call() operator. It allows execution of any function in the context of an object passed into the function, or, in other words, changing the this reference a function uses for the duration of the call.

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This is the second installment of my AJAX overview. If you missed the first part, you can read it here. In this post I’d like to show two different approaches that AJAX frameworks usually take.

Server-side frameworks with AJAX integration
Some AJAX frameworks combine dynamic page generation with AJAX components. This allows seamless integration of AJAX features with the advantages of the respective server-side technology. Much of the content is still dynamically created on the server like in a traditional UI but additional JavaScript code is added by the framework enabling AJAX-based features.

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AJAX is one of the most commonly heard buzz words when it comes to Web user interfaces (Web UIs).  I have now been working on several Web UIs using AJAX techniques and would like to share a few insights. I will start off with a review of how traditional web applications were – and still are – coded and how AJAX fits into this picture.

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