AJAX is an acronym for a couple of technologies that make it possible for developers to update a web page content at the control level without having to do a complete page refresh. In this article Pieter Siegers takes a look at how far Ajax has evolved today with respect to .NET. He will take three current popular Ajax frameworks for .NET development – Atlas, Anthem.NET and Ajax.NET Professional -, and look at various aspects of their installation and use in ASP.NET applications. Then he will compare all three frameworks and look at their capacity to make Ajax-like development for .NET simpler. In part 2 of this article, he will continue the comparisons and produce a table that compares features for each of the frameworks.

Author:Pieter Siegers
Editor:David Schultz
Reviewers:James Greenwood, Saurabh Nandu

In Part 1 of this series, Pieter Siegers explained how Ajax help you develop web applications that are more responsive, faster, and put less load on the network, and in particular took three .NET-based Ajax frameworks – Anthen.NET, Ajax.NET Professional, and Atlas, and showed how to obtain and install them. This article will continue with the examples. You’ll see a comparison between these frameworks with respect to their capacity to ease Ajax-like web development. Finally Pieter supplies a simple feature-comparing table where you can easily determine which framework suits you best.

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)-based mapping applications are among the most powerful new tools on the Web. Mapping tools can be used in a variety of applications including real estate mapping, geographic tracking programs, educational tools and even games. In this article Michael Coles will introduce one of the hottest new custom mapping tools: the Google Maps API version 1.0. This article is designed to get you up and running with your own Google Maps quickly by creating several simple examples using the Google Maps API. The default example provided by Google will cover the basics of using the API, the second example will expand on that by adding a icon and an info window. The last example will combine the Google Maps API and AJAX to create an animated map.

Author:Michael Coles
Editor:
Reviewers:Neil Piggot, Teun Duynstee