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AJAX

Overview

To see AJAX in action, visit our Sample/Tutorial Pages (these also ship with Alpha Five V9).
http://afas.alphasoftware.com/SamplePagesv9/#whatsnew

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)  is a group of web development techniques that increase responsiveness and interactivity of web applications. This is done by exchanging data with the server "behind the scenes" so that entire web pages do not have to be reloaded each time new data are fetched.

See an example of this principle in the following video:

Watch Video

The Ajax technique is used to build web applications that have the speed and responsiveness you would typically find in desktop applications. Some well known examples of sites that use Ajax are Gmail (the email service from Google) and Netflix.com (the video rental service).

Ajax is at the very cutting edge of web technologies. Unfortunately, the learning curve for implementing Ajax techniques is very steep. The programmer typically needs to have a solid working working knowledge of Javascript, the Document Object Model, XML and HTML. Until now...

Alpha Five Version 9 Platinum includes the Alpha Five AJAX Javascript Library, which greatly simplifies the amount of Javascript you need to know in order to succesfully implement Ajax techniques yourself. To further simply the job, Alpha Five also includes a collection of working Ajax examples (including a powerful Ajax tree control and cascading lookups) that you can easily customize for your own application.

With these examples and this robust Javascript library, you can build your own robust web applications using Ajax techniques, without the steep learning curve.

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The example above shows a Javascript tree control that ships with Alpha Five V9 Platinum Edition. In this case, a customer table stored in SQL Server is sorted by Country and City. When you choose a particular country, the page automatically shows you cities for that country in which there are customer records. By clicking on a particular city, you can see individual customers.

Watch Video

Because this page uses Ajax techniques, only the data you actually need to see are being sent to the  browser. This means that browsing a table of millions of records could seem instantaneous - since there is no need to send the millions over the Internet. The only ones sent are the ones you want to see.