Well, I’m officially late to the party. Spending the last two years focused on desktop software development, I let the progress of web development pass me by. As the primary source of production for a very small development company, keeping up with the progress of both technologies was a luxury I couldn’t afford.
So here I am, playing catch up in the web world.
Having worked with Microsoft technologies for more than five years, ASP.NET AJAX is where I started to discover Web 2.0. (Honestly, I can’t stand the term Web 2.0… it’s a buzzword for managers) I understood that the foundation of this new generation of web technology was asynchronous data access, allowing for partial page load and ridding our applications of crunchy postbacks.
For developers that are new to the idea of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and have a good working knowledge of .NET technologies, Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is a good way to get started. Using either Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Web Developer (a free Visual Studio product aimed at the beginning web developer) you can drag and drop your way to your first AJAX experience. The all important “Hello World”.
When you’re done frustrating yourself with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, here are some JavaScript frameworks that I can recommend:
Prototype JavaScript Framework
