Το φιτρί αγόρι (colourful life)

Days ago I tried  ASP.NET AJAX for an autocomplete text field in a form. The results were automatic, in no time you could have the most common and famous features you see in your favourite sites. But after dragging and dropping some controls here and there, and also adding a bunch of .dll’s to the project, a question appeared: what if I want a small modification?

Well, the answer wasn’t clear for me. Perhaps because my experience with ASP.NET is not so big enough to make some changes to a library that packs functionality in other language. Some times I want the things straightforward: from A to B.

So today I decided to reimplement the system using a javascript framework/library. I took a look to some of the libraries available on the net. I did a fast preview of these little amazing libraries and I liked them all. For my tests I chose jQuery.

Results: In one day not only was able to reproduce what I did with ASP.NET AJAX. I personalized the interface adding the functionality I wanted: calendars, creating new sections on the fly. And all this without a call to a piece of server code (except for the autocomplete part).

Before this change, even the javascript code was served using an aspx file server. For god shake! they’re static files! Do you really need to execute an aspx to serve a static file? Now I was able to setup the interface using XHTML, CSS and javascript.

But don’t think that .NET is the bad boy. I like a lot the “webservice” implementation it has. It can output JSON to feed your hungry AJAX/AJAJ applications. With a good web client for fast and quick tests.

Some other links I found interesting:

• AJAX Libraries API: improve your load times loading the libraries from google.
• Script.aculo.us: nice effects but using Prototype.
• jQuery documentation: good reading.