Languages and Software to Be Used
Three major technologies will be used in this course:
- LAMP, including Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP,
- Android, including Android Studio, Java, and XML, and
- AJAX, including (X)HTML, CSS, HTML DOM, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, and XML.
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)
With AJAX, web applications can send data to and retrieve from a server asynchronously (in the background) without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page.
AJAX is a group of technologies to create asynchronous web applications:
- XHTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can be used in combination to mark up and style information.
- Dynamic display and interaction use the DOM (Document Object Model), which defines a standard way for accessing and manipulating HTML documents.
- Data interchange and manipulation use XML and XSLT.
- Asynchronous data retrieval uses XMLHttpRequest.
By using the XMLHttpRequest object, a web developer can change a page with data from the server after the page has loaded.
- JavaScript binds everything together.
The AJAX example below shows how a web page can communicate with a web server online via a standard HTML form: