I know some people reading will be aware of ‘AJAX’ and ‘web 2.0′ while others will be utterly disinterested – If you’re not a nerdy geek type like me I’d stop reading now since what follows will probably send you to sleep

I won’t enter into discussions about the use of the terms AJAX and web 2.0, personally I don’t like them but they’re recognisable terms so for the sake of easy reference I’m using them. AJAX is something I’ve wanted to learn for a while but I’ve never really had need to, not having had any projects which might make proper use of it, until last week.

I needed to make a event calendar for the front page of the site I look after at work. It needed to fit in a small space but offer as much information about up coming events as possible. My solution involved a mini calendar with event dates highlighted and clickable to display the relevant event information. Without using AJAX methods getting it working would have been a lot harder and much less user friendly. Its not live yet, once it is I’ll post a link and show off.

During my ‘learning’ phase I found a fair few useful sites/posts/code snippets which I thought I’d share for those who know what I’m on about.

Activity Indicator : At times you’ll need to let the user know that ’something’ is happening in the background, like when there’s a delay in fetching the data. Ian Selby came up with this superb use of ‘Ajax.responders’ to do just that.
gen-x-design.com

Activity Indicator Animated .gif Generator : To go with the above, loads of options and massive time saving! (nice looking site too)
ajaxload.info

script.aculo.us : The AJAX toolkit of choice. I spent a good day coding my own HTTPrequest functions only to find that script.aculo.us includes exaclty what I’d done and then some… and its easier to use.
script.aculo.us

Ajaxian : Great source of news and tips about AJAX methods and projects
Ajaxian.com

Photoshop Lab : Some great Photoshop tutorials demonstrating how to recreate some of the effects that are currently en vogue with a lot of sites (‘How to do web 2.0 design’ for want of a better way of putting it)
Photoshoplab.com