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Proof of Concept For Ajax Without JavaScript

Posted by timothy on from the now-make-a-good-acronym-for-comet dept.

JonathansCorner.com writes "Even if Ajax was backronymed to 'Asynchronous JavaScript and XML,' it works with JSON substituted for XML. Here's a proof of concept that JavaScript/VBScript are not strictly necessary either. The technique, besides being used standalone, may be useful to provide a better 'graceful degradation' for Ajax applications used by clients with scripting turned off."

13 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. iFrames? by BlueBoxSW.com · · Score: 4, Funny

    Been using iFrames to get around web restrictions since before you lost your virginity...

    1. Re:iFrames? by ArcadeNut · · Score: 4, Funny

      ... before you lost your virginity...

      You're making a pretty big assumption there....

      --
      Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
  2. Re:iFrame? by uglyduckling · · Score: 5, Informative

    No. It's someone who has stuck an iFrame in their page and written a python script to return different html for the iFrame depending on what you click. It's 1998 technology 'dynamic' pages. Nothing to see here...

  3. Nothing to see here, etc by hkz · · Score: 3, Informative

    So you post a form to an iframe by pressing a submit button, and the iframe reloads with new dynamic content? And this is somehow AJAX? The whole interesting thing with AJAX is that you can interact with the web server while staying on the same page. You can type something into a search box, say, and the webserver sends you back some matching words in real time. Sure you could mimic the same thing with a POST and a results page, but that is exactly the paradigm that AJAX was supposed to replace.

  4. How is this new? by vivin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Posting to an iframe and loading the iframe with dynamic content?

    Haven't RTFA (slashdotted), but I used to do "AJAX" without "AJAX" in the early 2000's. You would post to a hidden iframe and the dynamic content that was loaded in the iframe was Javascript, which would manipulate the parent page. Either that or it was JSON would you would then access from the parent page.

    --
    Vivin Suresh Paliath
    http://vivin.net

    I like
    1. Re:How is this new? by uglyduckling · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's not new. I got to the article before it was slashdotted. The author (who is also the author of the story) created a python script that spits out different inline CSS depending on the button you select to style some text, loading it into an iframe, in other words the sort of messy 'dynamic' pages that many sites used before being replaced by AJAX.

    2. Re:How is this new? by VTI9600 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Me too. The framework I used was JSRS. IIRC, it worked by creating hidden iframes on the fly for server-side communication and had dispatchers for PHP, ASP, perl and others. I don't recall if it was asynchronous or not, but pretty much anything can be made asynchronous in javascript by using the setInterval or setTimeout functions. The only thing I could tell was different was the fact that AJAX used the XMLHttpRequest object.

      So, naturally I was dumbfounded when people started talking about how amazing and cool AJAX was. I thought, "Hasn't this been around for years?"

  5. Re:CGI scripts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you are forking a sub-process for every CGI script call, you're doing it wrong .-)

    Fastcgi came around in the nineties and there exists various pooled process executors for various techs (perl, C etc).

    I agree CGI is a web relic, but it isn't necessarily as bad as you painted it.

  6. Re:iFrame? by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 3, Funny

    Like a true slashdotter I have not read the article, but the precursor to AJAX was just to use iFrames (or pre-iframe frames). Is this any different or better?

    Well, it's AJAX without all the pesky 'JAX' ... but it does have an iFrame*, so it's 'Ai' ... not to be confused with 'AI' which is something completely different. Now, the 'Ai' may have a JSON appended to replace the 'X', which would make it 'AiJ' which is completely different from AJAX, though not necessarily better (not necessarily as in not).




    * iFrame has no relation to iPads, iPhones, iPods or any other iApple product. The occurrence of the vowel is purely coincidental ... though I think iFrames are about as popular with good web designers as iApples are with Linux coders.

  7. Re:Continuous server polling by Culture20 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Just working on an online Rock Paper Scissors game .... I didn't want to get into javascript before sorting everything out without it. But everything seems to work fine, just by using
    META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="3/...poll-url"
    So I think I can keep javascript out of the game code

    1994 weeps for your server and network load, especially since /. is going to give you a free scalability test in 3, 2, 1

  8. Next up... styling without CSS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Courtesy of the font tag.

  9. This is news? by bearinboots · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wow. The barrier to entry for getting an article on slashdot has really lowered, hasn't it? How is this even worth the blog post?

  10. Re:Bad idea by coolgeek · · Score: 3, Funny

    That it is better to be a fool and remain silent, than to speak and remove all doubt.

    --

    cat /dev/null >sig