It’s been well over a year since I first began working with the team over at Spout (www. spout. com). In the course of that year, I’ve been professionally challenged by the sheer amount of cutting-edge work that I have been asked to develop. I can still remember Brian Anderson (NuSoft Solutions) coming to Nick McCollum and me with a few sheets of paper detailing a new third-party web tool that we should take a look at. The design documents were a brief listing of the sample code for Ajax. NET by Michael Schwarz. Not only had Michael built an awesome library, but he had done so for free. Nick and I embraced the library without he- tation. Admittedly, we overused the library at first. We Ajax’d the site to its fullest extent. Need a user control built? Use Ajax! At least that is how it felt at first. We were truly excited (and remain so today) about the possibilities of Ajax and where it would lead our project. I want to share this excitement with you. An Overview of This Book I want to deal with the world of Ajax to its finest detail. In order to do that, we’ll need to discuss where Ajax came from, what it comprises, and how we can implement modern third-party Ajax libraries.
