Concise AJAX tutorial

[evstevemd]

Hi,
This is my first post, and bear with me if I'm little noobish. I need Concise yet well understandable AJAX/PHP tutorial. I have already read one at w3school but I need little more complex yet concise.
Regards

[whoisgregg]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, evstevemd!

If you want to hit the ground running and avoid reinventing the wheel with AJAX I'd recommend using one of the major javascript libraries out there. Prototype [prototypejs.org] happens to be my choice and there is also jQuery [jquery.com], Yahoo! YUI Library [developer.yahoo.com], and mooTools [mootools.net].

Each of those has pretty straightforward AJAX support and tutorials to get you started. The drawbacks include large file sizes to support other features you might not use and it can make it somewhat harder to get help with code, because most of us tend to have our favorite and don't know the syntax for other libraries.

[evstevemd]

Thanks Gregg.
I once tried JQuery and it was pretty fun. I didn't tried AJAX though. why do YOU prefer that one? Any jump start tutorial on that?

[daveVk]

Agree with whoisgregg, consider going one step further with one of the php frameworks and it prefered js library

JQuery site has good ajax examples.

[evstevemd]

PHP frameworks? Meaning CakePHP, Symfony et al?
I will go for JQuery but I wanted to know why he chose Prototype over JQuery

[Fotiman]

I agree as well, that using a framework is good option. My framework of choice is YUI, then jQuery. One of the selling points for me on YUI was the excellent documentation and the extensive user community, though other frameworks have improved their documentation over the past couple of years as well. Prototype has always been my LEAST favorite framework because it directly extends the DOM.

[whoisgregg]

I haven't spent enough time with the other frameworks recently to really compare and contrast. When I first started I played around with mooTools, jQuery and Prototype and Prototype seemed to fit my style best.

jQuery has matured quite a bit since I first checked it out though and I plan on trying it out again eventually.