Book review: Advanced Ajax by Lauriat (Part 2 of 2)

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, April 2, 2008 @ 12:49 pm

Back in February, I reviewed the first half of Shawn M. Lauriat's "Advanced Ajax: Architecture and Best Practices" (Prentice Hall, 2008, 360p). The first four chapters of Lauriat's book, which focused almost exclusively on client-side technologies, impressed me considerably. But it's taken me several weeks to get through the remainder of the book, and there's one reason why: PHP.

The server-side portion of "Advanced Ajax" uses PHP code to illustrate its many and varied lessons about Ajax architecture. It's not that I have anything against the popular web-development framework and scripting language. It's just that, after spending my career in the ASP Classic and JSP trenches and slowly ramping up on Rails in the last year, I'm not the ideal target audience for these code samples. Adding "PHP" to the title of the book might have limited its potential audience, but it also would have been more accurate.

That said, there's a lot of value here for adherents of any server-side framework. Lauriat discusses each topic from a general perspective before diving into the code. The technical approach to a given problem would obviously differ by framework, but the high-level approach wouldn't. If you don't mind skimming past the content that doesn't apply to you, Lauriat's advice about developing stable, scalable, accessible and secure Ajax applications transcends framework allegiance.

Chapter 5, "Performance Optimization," delves into database performance, caching, profiling and debugging. Chapter 6, "Scalable, Maintainable Ajax," covers everything from modular architecture to the concatenation of CSS and JavaScript files for faster deployment to the client. Lauriat covers the basics of MVC development in Chapter 7, "Server-Side Application Architecture." Security gets its due in Chapter 8, "Keeping a Web Application Secure." These chapters will make quick reading for anyone not interested in the lengthy PHP code samples, but the general principles are solid and worth taking to heart.

The book's final few chapters prove the most compelling for a general web-development audience. Lauriat devotes an entire chapter to documentation, coding standards, programming guides and style guides - including a look at JSDoc, the open-source, automated JavaScript documentation tool. But it's Chapter 10, "Game Development," that brings everything together. Lauriat uses PHP and cutting-edge client-side code (via the HTML 5 canvas element) to build Universe Conflict, an Ajax implementation of the venerable Space War! shooter game. Given that most example applications tend toward e-commerce or CRUD admin interfaces, it's refreshing to see Ajax employed for something frivolous and fun. That said, Lauriat convincingly demonstrates that games require the same architectural and security principles as any other application. The author closes with some final, high-level conclusions in Chapter 11.

Overall, "Advanced Ajax" proved to be a worthwhile read despite my lack of PHP mojo. Of its 11 chapters, 5 1/2 are full of examples that could be applied to any development framework, while the other 5 1/2 are full of sage advice that requires translation for non-PHP platforms.

The book is available from Amazon and Safari Books Online, while the publisher has made a sample chapter available on its website.

Full disclosure: Agile Ajax received a free promotional copy of this book for review.

agile ajax

Comments

• Leave a comment
• Comment feed for this post
• TrackBack URL

None so far.

Leave a comment