Getting Started with Ajax
June 23, 2005
Part 2: Serving Useful Information as XML
In Part 1 of this article we focused on the client aspect of an Ajax example that retrieved note information
from a static XML file. In this part, we will focus on the server side as we build a more
sophisticated solution for serving information for a pageable data table.
Application Overview
As in the example in Part 1, this example uses the
xmlOpen(...) Javascript function
to request information from the server. We will skip the client side details since they have
already been discussed. In order to properly serve the Ajax requests, our application will
consist of a few Java classes:
-
TableServletis located in thecom.skillfusion.xmlhttprequest.servletspackage and is responsible for processing the incoming Ajax request and responding with valid XML. This class will delegate data retrieval to theTableManager. -
TableManageris located in thecom.skillfusion.xmlhttprequest.utilpackage and is responsible for supplying valid XML data for a single page of a table. It is a very simple table manager and does not support filtering or sorting. However, these features could easily be added in a production system. For simplicity, this class uses hard coded data instead of accessing an external data source. In a production system, this class would probably get the data from a database, web service, xml data set, etc.
