Ajax Part 2: The Ajax Filmstrip

Last week we saw the very basics of Ajax, we’ve learned to make asynchronous requests to the web server, thus freeing us from reloading a web page. This allows us to have much more of an “application like” feel to our web pages – or web application pages.

Last week we simply verified a username and presented a message to the user. Nice and useful, but not extremely exciting. What if we wanted to deal with images? Adding images to the ballgame opens our creative minds and gets the juices flowing! Furthermore, we’d like to think in a slightly more object oriented way than just stacking up loads of functions to do our dirty work. Pretty soon we’ll find we’ve added new functionality but also tons of overhead to our pages. We want to avoid that.

For this lesson we’re going to build a very basic (and I mean basic) version of the Windows “Filmstrip” functionality.