Customized Ajax Training Courses

Following are the main Ajax-specific topics that can be covered in the course taught by Marty Hall. If you have a group of at least eight interested developers (10 for courses outside the US or Canada), contact Marty to arrange a course at your location. If you have fewer than about eight developers, see the public Ajax & GWT training course page for info on the open-enrollment version of the course.

Also note that for clients whose developers have little experience in server-side development, these Ajax-specific topics can be combined with servlet and JSP programming topics, since you need both client-side code and server-side code to develop Ajax applications. Some clients also want to add Ajax coverage to the Struts or JSF courses. However, many clients already have strong servlet/JSP skills and want to learn only the Ajax-specific parts, and these are the topics listed below. Contact Marty to put together a customized blend of topics to fit your needs.

Syllabus: Summary

Please note that there are more topics listed here than can be covered in a five-day course, so we need to work with your management and developers to choose the topics that are most appropriate to your needs. The GWT topics can also be presented as a standalone two-day course.

• Review of Java-based Web apps (Eclipse, deployment, servlets, JSP, MVC)
• Foundational topics (JavaScript, XHTML, CSS)
• Ajax basics (Basics I, Development/Debugging Tools, Basics II, XML and JSON data handling, JSTL)
• More with JSON (Automatic JSON generation, JSON-RPC)
• Custom tags (Building your own tags, using AjaxTags)
• Prototype (Ajax support, general support, OOP support)
• Scriptaculous (Ajax support, visual effects)
• jQuery (Ajax support, CSS support, effects, rich GUIs)
• Dojo (Ajax support, rich GUIs I, rich GUIs II)
• GWT (Basics, events, panels, RPC I, RPC II, JSNI)
• Ajax with JSF (JSF basics, page navigation, managed beans, Ajax4JSF/RichFaces, IceFaces)

Syllabus: Details

Review

• Installing and running Java-based Web applications, JSP scripting,
  using jsp:include, the MVC architecture

Foundational Topics

Note that these foundational topics are not all at the beginning, but are instead scattered throughout the course.

• Crash course on JavaScript: Part I (General JavaScript features)
• Crash course on JavaScript: Part II (XML-specific and browser-specific features)
• Crash course on XHTML
• Crash course on CSS

Ajax Basics

• Ajax basics: Part I
• Ajax development and debugging tools
• Ajax basics: Part II
• Ajax data handling: XML, JSON, and custom formats
• Handling variable-length Ajax data with JSTL

More with JSON

• Automatically building JSON from Java objects
• JSON-RPC

Abstracting Ajax with JSP Custom Tags

• Building JSP custom tag libraries: basics
• Building JSP custom tag libraries: advanced topics
• The AjaxTags library: basics
• The AjaxTags library: advanced topics

The Prototype JavaScript Framework

• Ajax-specific support
• General JavaScript support
• OOP support

Script.aculo.us

• Ajax-specific support
• Visual effects

jQuery

• Ajax-specific support
• CSS support
• General JavaScript support
• Rich GUIs

Dojo

• Ajax-specific support
• Rich GUIs I
• Rich GUIs II

The Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

• Setup and basics
• Event handling
• Panels and page layout
• Widgets
• RPC: Part I
• RPC: Part II
• The JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI)

Using Ajax with JavaServer Faces (JSF)

• Setup and basics
• Page navigation
• Managed beans
• Ajax4jsf (JBoss RichFaces)
• IceFaces