Ajax Tutorial Part I: The Basics

Interested in training from the author of these tutorials? See the upcoming Ajax & GWT courses in Maryland, co-sponsored by Johns Hopkins Engineering for Professionals. Marty is also teaching a GWT course in Oslo Norway in March 2013. Or, contact hall@coreservlets.com for info on customized courses at your location.


This is the first section of the much larger Ajax and GWT tutorial. This section concentrates on the basics: the underlying Ajax mechanisms, development and debugging tools, data handling, JavaScript, and xhtml. Click on a topic below to get the detailed tutorial, download the source code, or try out exercises on the topic.

The Ajax training courses on which this tutorial is based are usually taught on-site at customer locations, but public training courses are periodically scheduled for people with too few developers for an onsite course. For descriptions of the various other courses that are available, please see the J2EE training course page. To inquire about a customized training course at your location, please contact Marty Hall at hall@coreservlets.com.

If you find these free tutorials helpful, we would appreciate it if you would link to us. Send corrections or feedback on any tutorial to hall@coreservlets.com.

Servlets and JSP: A Review of the Basics

Java is used for the server-side code throughout the Ajax tutorials; this section provides a quick review of the basics of servlets and JSP. Please note that this section is not detailed enough for those who have never done server-side programming in Java; it is intended as a review for those who have done it before, but are rusty. If you are new to building Web apps in Java, please see the beginning and intermediate servlet and JSP tutorials. Techniques specific to a particular Ajax technology (e.g., JSON-RPC, GWT, Ajax4jsf) are covered in the section of the Ajax tutorial that focuses on that Ajax technology.

Deploying Apps to the Johns Hopkins Server

This section is only directly applicable to graduate students in the Johns Hopkins University "Engineering for Professionals" program; it discusses details of uploading WAR files to the JHU Tomcat server. However, the general principles are applicable to any developer: test in your local Eclipse/Tomcat environment, make a WAR file, upload the WAR file to the production server, test again with the only changes to URLs being changing "localhost" to the host name of the production server.

Ajax Basics: Part I

Ajax Development and Debugging Tools

Ajax Basics: Part II

XHTML: A Crash Course

Skip or skim this section if you are already pretty comfortable with XHTML.

JavaScript Crash Course: Part I -- Basics and Core Language Syntax

JavaScript Crash Course: Part II -- Functions and Objects

JavaScript Crash Course: Part III -- HTML and Browser-Specific Features

JavaScript Crash Course: Part IV -- XML Parsing

Ajax Data Handling Basics: XML, JSON, and String Data

Using JSTL (JSP Standard Tag Library) with Ajax

More Information

Java

JSF (JavaServer Faces)

Servlets & JSP
Ajax, GWT, & JavaScript

Spring, Hibernate, & JPA

Struts