Intro to AJAX

Intermediate

Approx. 2 weeks

Assumes 6hrs/wk (work at your own pace)

Join thousands of students Course Summary

In this course you will learn how to make asynchronous requests with JavaScript (using jQuery’s AJAX functionality), and gain a better understanding of what’s actually happening when you do so. You will also learn how to use data APIs so you can take advantage of freely accessible data in your applications, including photo results, news articles and up-to-date data about the world around us.

As part of the course, you’ll be building a web app that will help people learn about a place where they want to move! Your app will query the Google Streetview, Wikipedia and New York Times APIs!

This course is also a part of our Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree.

Why Take This Course?

User experience is vital to the success of your website or web app. It’s important that the user’s experience be smooth and free of jank, yet the application will have to do things that take a long time to complete. AJAX allows app developers to interact with server-side APIs without pausing script execution or forcing the page to reload.

Plus, learning how to query data APIs will open you to a tremendous amount of free data that’s freely accessible. Want to build a flight tracking app? How about a photo gallery with image search? Or what about a tweet viewer? Just find an API that provides the data you need, read the documentation and sample code, and query away!

If you want to build solid and fast web applications, knowing how to query servers using AJAX is a must.

Prerequisites and Requirements

• Intermediate proficiency with JavaScript (equivalent to having finished JavaScript Basics).
• Familiarity with HTML/CSS.

See the Technology Requirements for using Udacity.

What Will I Learn? Projects Project: Neighborhood Map You will develop a single-page application featuring a map of your neighborhood or a neighborhood you would like to visit. You will then add additional functionality to this application, including: map markers to identify popular locations or places you’d like to visit, a search function to easily discover these locations, and a listview to support simple browsing of all locations. You will then research and implement third-party APIs that provide additional information about each of these locations (such as StreetView images, Wikipedia articles, Yelp reviews, etc). Syllabus Inspiration

• What is AJAX?
• Why use an API?
• How can you identify AJAX requests in existing websites?

Perspiration

• Clone the Move Planner repository
• Implement the Google Streetview API
• Implement the NY Times API
• Error handling normal AJAX requests
• Implement the Wikipedia API
• Error handling JSON-P requests

Meditation

• What did you learn?
• How else can you apply AJAX to make speedy page loads?
• Go customize!