AJAX rocks and has made JavaScript fun again

I'll admit, the last time I seriously coded JavaScript (like, a LOT of it, and complex code) was atleast 7 years ago, if not more like 9-10. That's not to say I've not wrote Javascript since then, but the last time I used it often was on the last community site I wrote, which ended in 2002. For the majority, I've only used bits of it for simple error checking or related things.

I've been working on a video streaming website, if you will. Anyways, I expect a great deal of user interaction to be done on the website, and often. So with that in mind not only did I want to make somethings fun and interesting but also to keep the load down as much as possible since it should have lots of people on it at all times. I decided to read up on AJAX and make some things with that. I've seen it used a lot, like on Youtube and stuff, but I've never really needed it. Since I'm very familiar with JavaScript I didn't need to really learn that to begin so I decided to start off simple. I wanted one of those awesome "flash looking" rater things you see on lots of video sites. Obviously the thought of submitting to php without refresh is exciting too. I set out to accomplish the rater script first, and worry about AJAXing other things like commenting and stuff later.

I began by googling around and I found this great AJAX PHP rater script tutorial that pretty much walks you through how to make a very basic rater script. I of course tweaked the one I made a lot more and did a few things differently, but having no clue what AJAX would be like this tutorial explains things very well. I have to say, for the AJAX framework, that I could not get the dojo one to work. I found the JQuery AJAX framework to be the easiest to use for me simply because it worked. Heh.

Anyways, it actually worked. The thing turned out nice. I spent a few hours on my version and am real impressed with it. I am looking forward to doing some comment system with AJAX and PHP aswell. JQuery is so easy to use. I don't know much about it other than a few things but I've made another ajax php script since the tutorial without any issue and recommend the tutorial for a read if you're interested in something with ajax.