SharePoint Web Services

Using web services is a fantastic way of producing application pages and web parts that can retrieve data dynamically using Ajax. Modern web sites rarely require postbacks when dealing with data on a page, and you will learn in this section how jQuery and the SharePoint web services can work in harmony.

jQuery has a number of ways it can talk to web services (see Table 5-1); here you will explore the different Ajax methods you can use.

In this scenario, you will be creating a News web part, which will display the latest three news articles from an announcements list called News. The news articles will have only a small amount of information, but when the user clicks a story, the full story will be retrieved and displayed alongside the title.