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Getting Started with Ajax

June 23, 2005

Prerequisites
Some of the examples in this article use J2EE (primarily Java Servlets) to implement server-side functionality. To fully understand Parts 2 and 3 of this article, knowledge of Java is required and general knowledge of the J2EE framework is recommended.

Since the article focusses on the XMLHttpRequest object and how it fits into Ajax, the article requires you have a good understanding of Javascript, XML, DHTML, and the HTML DOM. Invaluable tutorials on these technologies can be found at W3Schools.
System Configuration
In this article, we will build simple Java web applications utilizing Ajax. To run the example applications, you will need Java SDK 1.4.2 or later and J2EE 1.3 or later. In addition, you will need a servlet container such as Tomcat 5.0. Ant scripts are included to facilitate compilation and deployment. You will need Apache Ant to run the build scripts. You may download Tomcat already bundled with the article's examples (pre-compiled and deployed) in the download section at the end of this article.