Dr. Garrett's Student Website
School of Business
Eastern Illinois University

Demo AJAX Program

This small program demonstrates how you can refresh portions of a web page using AJAX techniques.

Run the sample

This code consists of 4 files:

  • ajax.html
  • sample1.txt
  • sample2.txt
  • sample3.txt

Here are source code listings for the 4 files:

ajax.html

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
function loadXMLDoc(url)
{
if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
{// code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlhttp.open("GET",url,false);
xmlhttp.send(null);
}
else
{// code for IE6, IE5
xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
xmlhttp.open("GET",url,false);
// Do not send null for ActiveX
xmlhttp.send();
}
document.getElementById('test').innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText;
}
</script>
<title>MIS 4530 Ajax Sample</title>
</head>

<body>

<div id="test">
<h2>Let AJAX change this text</h2>
</div>
<button type="button" onclick="loadXMLDoc('test1.txt')">Message 1</button>
<button type="button" onclick="loadXMLDoc('test2.txt')">Message 2</button>
<button type="button" onclick="loadXMLDoc('test3.txt')">Original</button>

</body>
</html>

test1.txt

<p>There are several reasons you might want to use AJAX:</p>
<ul>
<li>Reduce the amount of data flowing from the server to the client</li>
<li>Speed up the web page</li>
<li>Make the application act more like a local app than a web page</li>
<li>Allow filtering at the client end to prevent corrupted data from being
sent to the server</li>
</ul>

test2.txt

<p>Most good web developers have many things in their toolboxes, including JavaScript, php, mysql, xml, and html. These tools all lead to robust, interactive web pages and add to the capability of the developer to to design flexible, artistic, and useful web pages.</p>

test3.txt

<h2>Let AJAX change this text</h2>