Sam’s random musings

Painless JavaScript Using Prototype:

The article reads like an introduction to Prototype, starting with the basics of installation and mentions of the helper functions. Following that, they move into more complicated things - extending the class, binding functions, and handling iterations “the Ruby way” (enumerable and hash).

They finish off things with a look at three more developed topics - how to use the library to help manage HTML forms, simple examples of how to alter the DOM of a page, and, of course, using Prototype for Ajax. The form functions allow you to work quickly and easly with HTML forms. This includes things like putting the focus on a field, serializing the results of the form. They show how the DOM functionality can insert/remove content on the page, and provide a simple example of the Ajax methods to connect to a remote PHP script.

Reading this can be a very aha moment for you. There are a lot of ways to implement AJAX (though most of what people call ajax is really just dhtml effects (IMHO)

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)