Summary

Ajax undoubtedly has the potential to greatly improve web interfaces. However, the paradigm change from traditional page-based interfaces to highly dynamic applications has created a few potholes for developers to step into. In this lesson we've tried to round up a few of the better-known ones.

Some of these issues have already been encountered in the other lessons in this book, whereas others will perhaps not become apparent until you start to develop real-world applications.

This lesson concludes Part III, "More Complex Ajax Technologies." If you have followed the lessons through to this point, you will by now have a good grip on the fundamentals of the XMLHTTPRequest object, JavaScript, XML, and the Document Object Model, and be capable of creating useful Ajax applications from first principles.

Fortunately, you don't have to always work from first principles. Many open source and commercial projects on the Internet offer a wide variety of Ajax frameworks, tools, and resources.

Part IV, "Commercial and Open Source Ajax Resources," of the book concludes our journey through Ajax development by looking at some of these resources and their capabilities.