WK4 - Experiencing Windows Vista.

Look! that's my desktop snapshot - experiencing Aero 3D Flipping. It's cool and fancy and can be running smoothly though a little tough to my IBM T60 laptop.

WK4 - Quick glance at AJAX.

AJAX, acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique for creating interactive web application, its intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amount of data with sever behind the scenes. AJAX like DHTML, LAMP and SPA is not a technology in itself but a term of the use of a group of technologies.

AJAX uses a combination of, see figure 2.1:

1. XHTML and CSS, for markup and styling.


2. DOM accessed with client-side scripting language such as Javascript and JScript, for dynamically display and interact with the information presented.


3. XMLHttpRequest object, for exchanging data asynchronously with the web server.


4. XML, as a format for transferring data between server and client.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

1. an improvement to the user's experience;


2. cut down the bandwidth consumption, "load on demand";


3. encourage programmers to clearly separate the methods and formats used for the different aspects of information delivery via the web.

Cons:

1. transparent to the history, means that browser doesn't return desired result as triggering the "Back" button and make user difficult to bookmark a particular state of the page;


2. network latency may lead to the web page looks weird;


3. be careful the Javascript, because the different implementation by different browsers or versions of a particular browser.

Reference:

• AJAX in Action - Chapter 2;
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
  

WK4 - What is LAMP?

The acronym LAMP (or L.A.M.P) refers to a solution stack of free software programs commonly used together to run dynamic Web sites or servers.

• L for Linux, (referring to OS kernel);
• A for Apache, (referring to Web server);
• M for MySQL, (referring to database management system);
• P for PHP, sometimes Perl or Python, (referring to the programming language).

The combination of these technologies is used primarily to define a web server intrastructure, define a programming paradigm of developing software, and establish a software distribution package.

And the LAMP stack is open source and origin in the CGI interfaces that becomes popular in the early 1990s. The LAMP could provide dynamic webpage comparing to other unified development solution such as J2EE, Microsoft's .NET architecture.

You can come to LAMP installation to build up your own web server.

Reference:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_%28software_bundle%29
• LAMP Installation
  

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