Re: AJAX and PHP

tedd wrote:

At 12:10 PM +0200 10/4/08, Alain Roger wrote:

HI, i'm currently working on some web application and i would like to know what is the best way to do what i want. basically like all application i have a menu and based on selected item menu i want to display a page (basically 50 % of this new page is DB result/grid. As usual i have 2 divs, one for the menu one for the content of DB to display. i would like to know if it's not better to use AJAX to load the content of the second div (DB result and other stuff) instead to every time load a new page which load menu and content of DB ? what are your experiences on such thing ? thx. -- Alain

Alain: The only difference the user experiences between having AJAX, or not, is refreshing the page. If page refresh is not a problem, then don't complicate your life. On the other hand, if page refresh is annoying, or not wanted, then AJAX is you're only solution. But as it has been said before, not all users have javascript turned on and as such AJAX will not work -- after all, it javascript. However, there are way to degrade gracefully from a AJAX site to a normal site. Google javascript graceful degradation" for references. Please note, going the AJAX route does not make your coding simpler -- it's a different critter. But it does (with help from jQuery et al) offer exciting new ways to present data. Cheers, tedd

this is a standard response for me recently; but have you looked in to using flex 3 to build the clientside? additionally ajax's main benefit (in my mind) is that it allows you to pull down/update only the data you need, and not the whole page - often this means you can skip out a large part of the templating and make the php server side scripts so much lighter; very beneficial when polling. Other than that, as everyone has mentioned - it's mainly a cosmetic thing. -- nathan ( nathan@kraya.co.uk ) { Senior Web Developer php + java + flex + xmpp + xml + ecmascript web development edinburgh | http://kraya.co.uk/ }