Web Development Solutions:
Ajax, APIs, Libraries, and Hosted Services Made Easy

By Mark 'Norm' Norman Francis, Christian Heilmann

As a web user, you'll no doubt have noticed some of the breathtaking applications available in today's modern web, such as Google Maps and Flickr—desktop applications than the old style web sites you are used to. You've probably also wished that you could create such things, and then thought "nahhh, I'd need to know a lot of complicated code to be able to even start creating sites like these." Well, think again.

There is a lot of complicated code involved in cutting edge "Ajax style" web applications, but a lot of the hard work is already done for you, and available on the Web. JavaScript libraries exist to provide most of that Ajax/DOM Scripting functionality out of the box. Application programming interfaces (APIs) exist to allow you to transplant complicated applications such as Google Maps and Flickr right into your own web sites. And hosting services such as Flickr and YouTube provide all you need to store and retrieve your media (be it images, video, or whatever) at your leisure, without having to worry about bandwidth issues and file naming nightmares.

All you need to know is enough to successfully wire together all this functionality successfully and responsibly, and this book shows you how. It starts from the very beginning of your journey, showing you what's available, what you need, and how to set up an effective development environment. After a solid base has been built, it shows you how to build up each aspect of your site, including storing, retrieving, and displaying content, adding images and video to your site, building effective site navigation and laying it all out beautifully using CSS, promoting your content so you will attract visitors to your site, and adding special effects to enhance usability and design asthetics...all with ready-made functionality available on the Web! Life as a web developer has never been easier.

Summary of Contents

• Chapter 1: Stop the Web … You're Getting On!
• Chapter 2: The Dilemma of "Rolling Your Own" Solutions
• Chapter 3: What You Need to Get Started
• Chapter 4: Spoiled for Choice—What the Web Offers You
• Chapter 5: Retrieving and Displaying Content with REST and Ajax
• Chapter 6: Adding Media Files
• Chapter 7: Promoting Your Content
• Chapter 8: Layout and Navigation
• Chapter 9: Adding Special Effects
• Chapter 10: What to Do and Where to Find Help When Things Go Wrong

This book is part of friends of ED's 'Solutions' series

The Solutions series continues the pragmatic approach of the Essential Guide, but offers more in-depth answers to common technology problems. Once you're up and running with a technology, a Solutions book is the one you want at hand when you run into a stumbling block. Each chapter focuses on an aspect of the technology and gives the answer to all of the common problems related with it. With every answer, you are provided with a full explanation of the issue, giving you the whys, the wheres, and the workarounds, and an example application or code snippet that you can use to solve the problem in your own application.