AJAX Tutorials

  • PHP Advent 2011: Cross-Origin Ajax with CORS

    I've had the honor of writing for this year's PHP Advent, blessing you all about Cross-Origin Requests with CORS:

  • JavaScript Coding with Class

    I've spent the last two weeks in London, eating fish'n'chips, drinking cup'o'tea, and being a hooligan at the Arsenal. Oh yeah, there was a MooTools hackathon too. The MooTools hackathon was hugely successful and I'll be providing more detail about what was accomplished and where MooTools is going over the coming weeks. It was also great to meet some of the development team in person instead of simple IRC. MooTools FTW!

  • Custom AJAX Content Handling with the Dojo Toolkit

    If you were to ask me for the top five words that should describe any JavaScript framework, one of them would be flexible.  The Dojo Toolkit is ultra-flexible in just about every way, using customizable classes and dojo-namespaced objects to to allow for maximal flexibility.  One of those dojo-namespaced objects, dojo.contentHandlers, is an object containing key->value pairs for handling the result of AJAX requests.  Let me show you how to use these content handlers and how you can create your own!

  • Drag and Drop MooTools File Uploads

    Honesty hour confession:  file uploading within the web browser sucks.  It just does.  Like the ugly SELECT element, the file input is almost unstylable and looks different on different platforms.  Add to those criticism the fact that we're all used to drag and drop operations, yet up until recently, you couldn't drag files into a browser to upload them, making file uploading within the browser unintuitive.  With recent advancements in browser technology, the drag and drop method is now supported, but it doesn't look good without a bit of work.  Luckily MooTools Core Developer Arian Stolwijk has created a set of classes to accommodate styling drag and drop file uploading within the browser.  Let's have a look at how it works!

  • Lazy Load Content and Widgets with MooTools and RequireJS

    The idea of lazy loading content is not new;  we've been lazy loading images (check out my MooTools LazyLoad plugin) for quite a while now.  And why wouldn't you lazy load content?  There are SEO advantages, load time advantages, bandwidth savings, and more, so including a bit of extra JavaScript could help your large website immensely.  In my latest redesign, I took the time to lazy load not just images but static content and social networking widgets to make my website's initial load happen faster to make user experience and Google rank improve.  Let me show you how I used MooTools and RequireJS to lazy load content.

  • MooTools History Plugin

    One of the reasons I love AJAX technology so much is because it allows us to avoid unnecessary page loads.  Why download the header, footer, and other static data multiple times if that specific data never changes?  It's a waste of time, processing, and bandwidth.  Unfortunately, at this point in the web, constant refreshes are the norm — but they don't have to be.  Christoph Pojer, a MooTools Core Developer, has added History to his PojerTools PowerTools library.  History replaces traditional same-site URL loading by providing a method to catch link clicks, load page content via AJAX (Mootools' Request.HTML class), modify the document's location object to keep "history" records, and re-evaluate content links to allow developers to create a fast, efficient one-page website.

  • RealTime Stock Quotes with MooTools Request.Stocks and YQL

    It goes without saying but MooTools' inheritance pattern allows for creation of small, simple classes that possess immense power.  One example of that power is a class that inherits from Request, Request.JSON, and Request.JSONP:  Request.Stocks.  Created by Enrique Erne, this great MooTools class acts as a wrapper for Request.JSON and Yahoo!'s YQL service.  Let me show you how to user Enrique's awesome MooTools JavaScript class!

  • MooTools Star Ratings with MooStarRating

    I've said it over and over but I'll say it again:  JavaScript's main role in web applications is to enhance otherwise boring, static functionality provided by the browser.  One perfect example of this is the Javascript/AJAX-powered star rating systems that have become popular over the past five years.  Star rating systems are attractive, allow us to avoid ugly forms, and prevent unnecessary page reloads.  A new plugin by Lorenzo Stanco called MooStarRating has hit the MooTools Forge and I wanted to share with you how to use it.

  • LightFace: Facebook Lightbox for MooTools

    One of the web components I've always loved has been Facebook's modal dialog.  This "lightbox" isn't like others:  no dark overlay, no obnoxious animating to size, and it doesn't try to do "too much."  With Facebook's dialog in mind, I've created LightFace:  a Facebook lightbox clone for MooTools.  LightFace and its family of classes work well with iFrames, images, AJAX-requested content, static positioning, and static content.

  • Introducing MooTools HeatMap

    It's often interesting to think about where on a given element, whether it be the page, an image, or a static DIV, your users are clicking.  With that curiosity in mind, I've created HeatMap: a MooTools class that allows you to detect, load, save, and display spots on a given area where a user has clicked.