News

Free AJAX 101 workshop offered

• By Shawna McAlearney
• July 18, 2006

Want to learn AJAX from the ground up? Or polish your developer skills? A free online course begins Aug. 4.

Sun Microsystems’ Technology Architect Sang Shin wants to teach you how to effectively use AJAX and its core technologies, such as JavaScript, CSS and DOM.

“In production environment, it is likely that you would use one or combination of various AJAX toolkits and frameworks,” Shin wrote in a description of the course. “The majority of the workshop is dedicated to discussing key frameworks and toolkits that are available today for building AJAX applications.” These include:

• Client-side JavaScript toolkits, such as Dojo, which hides the low-level processing of XMLHttpRequest;
• DWR (Direct Web Remoting), which enables RMI-like invocation from the JavaScript client code to backend Java class;
• AJAX-enabled JSF components which allows the building of AJAX apps by dragging-and-dropping UI components;
• Wrapper technology such as jMaki that permits use of AJAX widgets from different sources using common interface;
• Java to JavaScript translator technology such as Google Web Toolkit (GWT); and
• Existing Web app frameworks with AJAX extensions such as Wicket, Echo2 or Shale.

The workshops consist of lectures and hands-on labs, which use NetBeans IDE 5.0 or 5.5 beta. Pre-requisites include one month Java programming experience, one month of HTML and one month of Web application programming experience. Shin plans to offer the three and one-half month course a couple of times a year.

The workshop will likely be heavily Java-based, considering Shin’s relationship with Sun. But in the face of a free hands-on course, who really minds?