Tutorial Overview

For .NET (C# or VB) programmers who want to learn Jaxcent, the samples included in the Jaxcent For .NET download are a good starting point. (For .NET programmers who are not familiar with it, Jaxcent is a web programming environment that basically lets you program webforms in a winforms style - by writing direct event handlers and interacting with the page.)

The prerequisites for this tutorial are:

• Java.  You should be comfortable in the Java programming language.
• HTML.  You should know HTML, and be familiar with HTML attributes and styles.

This tutorial teaches AJAX programming in Java using the Jaxcent Java AJAX framework. Jaxcent

• is all-Java and requires no JavaScript programming.
• integrates well with other Java server-side programming, by providing access to the Java server-side session and application objects.

Even though programming in Jaxcent doesn't require JavaScript, there is some JavaScript used in this tutorial (in the Data Verification and Working with JavaScript topics.) Those who do not wish to use any JavaScript may skip these parts. But it is recommended that you should at least try to read through and if possible do the exercises in these parts of the tutorial. Even if you don't know any JavaScript, just going through the exercises will give you a basic exposure to JavaScript, enough to understand what it is all about. For Ajax programmers, such familiarity could prove helpful once in a while.

The steps in the tutorial are outlined below:

1. Getting Started
2. Hello, World
3. A Dancing Hello, World!
4. Listening to Hello, World Events
5. Adding a New Page
6. Working with Tables and Lists
7. Receiving Input from the Page
8. The Session
9. Retrieving Session Data
10. Navigation in Web Applications
11. Data Verification
12. Working with JavaScript
13. Hiding and Showing Page Elements
14. Adding New Elements and Moving Existing Elements
15. Saving Your Own Data in the Session
16. Dragging and Dropping
17. Optimization Issues
18. Further Learning

Getting Started