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8.5. Summary

Sarissa and scriptaculous are powerful AJAX libraries. Sarissa is focused on XML, making it a great choice if you already heavily use XML throughout your tool chain. Its main features include the following:

  • Cross-browser support

  • The ability to create DOM documents from XML strings

  • XSLT support for transforming XML documents

  • XPath support for querying nodes within XML documents

Scriptaculous offers many of the exciting features that AJAX applications are known for. Using it, you can easily create highly interactive applications that are both visually appealing and easy to use. The main features of scriptaculous include the following:

  • Visual effects, such as fade in/out elements

  • Drag-and-drop support

  • Sortable lists

  • Slider controls

Both of these libraries make a good building block for an AJAX application. They offer clean API, useful functionality, and a tight enough focus that they are easy to combine with other libraries. In the next chapter, we look at HTML_AJAX. It is a JavaScript/PHP library that focuses on server interaction, simplifying using PHP as the back end for an AJAX application.


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