Implementing AJAX in ASP.NET
December 8th, 2005 by alpriest
Everybody is talking about AJAX nowadays since Google Maps and Google Suggest showed the world how cool it can be. We used this technology at a previous employer 3 years ago for displaying live gambling odds… but anyway I thought i’d take a look at what libraries are out there for doing this in .NET.
Top hit in Google was the Ajax.NET library, and following a simple walk-through of using it, in less than 10 minutes i’ve created a page with an AJAX request / response. An attribute markes public methods AJAX-capable, and the AJAX assembly then outputs the necessary glue to connect a Javascript method to your server side method.
Primitives come across just fine from the server, but you can also pass complex and custom data structures too - anything that it serialisable in fact. This means having a similar object model available on the server and client.
This is a very quick implementation of AJAX in terms of development effort so it’ll definitely stay in my toolbox… if only I can come up with a useful need for it.
