At the forge: Scriptaculous

Ajax is the hot new Web development paradigm that uses JavaScript to send and then handle asynchronous HTTP requests. The past few months, this column has looked into different ways to spawn and handle Ajax calls. The most complicated way was to do it ourselves, creating an XMLHttpRequest object, and then using it to send a request to the user's browser as well as to specify which JavaScript function will handle the response. Last month, we showed that we can simplify our lives greatly by using Prototype, a JavaScript library that includes many of the shortcuts and utility functions that are of use to JavaScript programmers.