These are the notes to my recent presentation on AJAX and forms to the New York Web Standards Meetup Group. These notes were purposefully left open and vague to facilitate discussion based on attendees’ interests—during the presentation a lot of good questions were asked. That dialogue is not represented here.

Hello, my name is Jeffrey Barke. I’m the Senior Developer and Information Architect for the US office of theMechanism and I plan on talking briefly about how to easily use AJAX to improve the usability of forms and admin/control panel interfaces.

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Updated mini AJAX yesterday after I discovered a function name conflict in Internet Explorer 7. This conflict only occurs if one is using mini AJAX in tandem with Prototype [which we do all the time]. For some unknown reason, this hadn’t been a problem for any of the other browsers [Safari, Firefox on Mac and Firefox, Opera on PC], but it caused the script to fail ignominiously in Internet Explorer 7.

So, if you downloaded mini AJAX from this site prior to 16 March 2007 and plan on using it with Prototype or script.aculo.us, please download the latest version here.

The New York Web Standards Meetup Group will be meeting at theMechanism on 22 March 2007 at 6:30 pm to discuss AJAX and form handling. We plan on giving a form submission demo utilizing mini AJAX and JSON.

22 March 2007 . 6:30 pm
theMechanism|eEmerge
440 9th Avenue 8th Floor
New York, NY 10001 [map]

Are we greater or lesser standardistas? Are you? We're not sure, but you can check it out and tell us…

Mini AJAX is a “handy, lightweight” set of AJAX functions recently adopted by theMechanism. While Tim Morgan’s script is well-documented and easy to plug into an existing application, we did find it a bit limiting that it only returns string data (responseText). Since we’re typically accessing XML, it would be nice to have the option of using responseXML.

So, we modified mini AJAX by adding two new methods that do just that:

ajax.getxml(strUrl, strFunc)
strUrl—the URL to query (can contain arguments after a “?”)
strFunc—the function to call once the response is returned
This method uses a GET request to query the specified URL and return a response as an XML DOM object to the specified function.

ajax.postxml(strUrl, strFunc, strArgs)
strUrl—the URL to query
strFunc—the function to call once the response is returned
strArgs—a string containing arguments to be passed to the URL
This method uses a POST request to query the specified URL and return a response as an XML DOM object to the specified function.

20070315 update—Updated mini AJAX after I discovered a function name conflict in Internet Explorer 7. This conflict only occurs if one is using mini AJAX in tandem with Prototype [which we do all the time]. For some unknown reason, this hadn’t been a problem for any of the other browsers [Safari, Firefox on Mac and Firefox, Opera on PC], but it caused the script to fail ignominiously in Internet Explorer.

The updated version of mini AJAX can be found here.

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