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Ajax Back, Forward, Reload and PHP
IdaAshley writes "A major challenge of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax)-driven Web sites is the lack of a Back button. Mike Brittain discusses ways to get around this obstacle in part 1 of the 'Developing PHP the Ajax way' series." From the article: "The Web is a page-by-page medium. The backward and forward buttons on your browser's toolbar direct the browser from page to page. When Macromedia's Flash became all of the rage, developers and users started to see how Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) break this metaphor. You might click around a few sites, land on a Flash-based Web site, then click around in it for a few minutes. One click of the Back button and the ride is over. Rather than going one step backward within the Flash site, you completely lose your place."
That has been discussed to death and known for years. You do it with a hidden iframe and anchor links (#blahblah). That's the gut of the whole deal.
All it does is create a history stack then store it as a cookie. The history is then used to power the back button in whatever the application is.
What'll intrigue me is when someone comes up with a way to integrate the back functions of ajax and friendsto work seamlessly with the browser back button. Hmm... someone should do a Firefox extension.
The hardest part would be deciding on a standard API for this.
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We already know that Morfik and GWT support all of these features, but does Script# or Atlas, yet? I didn't think so, but my memory may be faulty. Even more importantly than knowing how to support is not having to know how to support it. Thankfully AJAX is advancing so quickly that articles like this are going to be less and less relevant since more and more tools will just implement the features right out of the box.
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I'm 99.5% positive that Adobe Flex can help address using back/forward buttons in the browser and Google has code to do this with Ajax. If I'm not mistaken, Gmail no longer croaks if you try using back/forward now. I'm at work and don't want to take the time to look up the links, so (hopefully) free mod points to whoever feels like posting some links to this stuff!!
That being said, the article is garbage. People ARE integrating it into the browser controls... no point in using this crappy method. Fact is, most users will, through force of habit, use the back/forward buttons, or mouse gestures, or keyboard shortcuts.
A major challenge of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax)-driven Web sites is the lack of a Back button
So says you. I say: if it makes sense for a user to hit your back button, why are you using Ajax? Do users hit their back button when they're using native desktop applications? Sounds to me like you're just to ajax-ify a traditional web application for the heluvit.
Ever use GMail? Next time you're ina folder hit your back button.
Guess what? Works as expected.
There's nothing magical about making the back and forward buttons work alonsgide AJAX. The way Google does it is to track a uniqke token that associates what your page state is on th ebackend, and pass the token along in an IFRAME every time you do something on the page. Since an IFRAME will work along withh your back/forward buttons, functionality is preserved.
It isn't rocket science. Sites who don't want to do this properly are either designed by people who don't know any better, are lazy, or some combination of the two.