Chapter 16. Creating Dynamic Interfaces with Rails and Ajax

Rails emerged at about the same time as Ajax did, and the two technologies can work tightly together. Ajax, a set of technologies for creating much more interactive interfaces in the browser, can connect neatly to Rails’ more server-based approach. There’s much more than that, though, as the Rails framework includes a number of components designed specifically for making it easier to build Ajax applications from inside of Rails.

Note:

Rails 3.0 improves its Ajax handling pretty tremendously, shifting to an unobtrusive JavaScript approach that can support multiple JavaScript frameworks, including Prototype and jQuery. This chapter will still provide you with an overview of how easy it is to create Ajax applications in Rails, but the underlying details are changing.