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Fri, Nov 2, 2:30 - 2:55, Haselton 2 Paper (refereed)

Recommended Citation: Dollinger, R. Consuming Web Services from AJAX Applications. In The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference 2007, v 24 (Pittsburgh): §2553. ISSN: 1542-7382.

Consuming Web Services from AJAX Applications

Refereed

16 pages

Robert Dollinger    [a1] [a2]
Department of Mathematics and Computing
University of Wisconsin Stevens Point    [u1] [u2]
Stevens Point, Wisconsin, USA    [c1] [c2]

Web applications require new and innovative techniques to manage the increased amount and variety of information they handle. The response to the challenge of Rich Internet Applications’ (RIA) requirements is a new web development methodology called AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML). AJAX is a set of technologies that work together, to leverage browser capabilities in order to reduce the amount and frequency of server postbacks. With AJAX, regular postback cycles are eliminated or replaced by requests, typically asynchronous, for some specific data that result in partial updates of the Web page. This considerably reduces the load on the Web Server and enhances scalability of the server side resources, while making interactive Web applications more responsive. When an AJAX application makes a server request it is most often talking to a piece of code residing on the Web server. This piece of code may connect to a database or another server in order to collect some data which is then sent to the client. When the client call is for a Web service method, developers are faced with a couple of problems to solve, and decisions they have to make: (1) architectural – call the service directly or via the Web server, (2) technical – how to correctly format a request and how to process the returned response, and (3) security – prevent or deal with cross-site scripting restrictions. In this paper we use a specific example in order to illustrate how to consume Web services in an AJAX application and to provide some general guidelines which make the process more structured and easier to understand.

Keywords: Rich Internet Applications, AJAX, Web Services, GET, POST, SOAP envelope, cross-site scripting

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