I taught myself AJAX yesterday. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but I finally had an excuse thanks to the Moving Box portfolio page (I’ll put up a link when it’s finished). Basically, I needed to load a bunch of different flash movies from a menu, and it seemed like a waste having to reload the whole page just to do it. I briefly considered using (gasp) an iframe, but soon decided that it probably wasn’t a good idea.

Thanks to Prototype, I went from ideas to having a working page in about an hour. They’ve got a bunch of nifty AJAX objects for most common needs, and even a nice tutorial-style article that helped me get started. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to learn the technique but doesn’t want to get too bogged down with details.

Since the Moving Box site runs Silk, I did everything as a plugin. I’m working on making it more general-purpose to try and expose pretty much all of the features of the framework via AJAX calls (Silk’s architecture actually makes this pretty easy). Soon it might be possible to run an entire site from one page load.

First thing’s first, though; I need to make things more accessible. A well known problem with AJAX is that it breaks bookmarking, the back button, and history. I’ve found a few useful articles that talk about ways to get around this, but haven’t started implementing anything yet. I’m definitely going to do so before unleashing this beast into the tubes, though.