Requirements for AJAX

AJAX is an asynchronous two-way communication between the browser that is considered to be the client, and a live web server via HTTP (or HTTPS). We can run a live server locally, such as Apache or IIS on Windows or Apache on Linux and Mac OS. I will take us through setting up the Apache web server in a Linux environment and simultaneously also explain how to use the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment to build web applications. For this AJAX course, let us pick PHP and MySQL to be our main server-side language and database.

In this chapter, I will take you through two setups; the first will be setting up Apache and PHP to develop server-side programs on a Linux machine, while the second one will be running a .NET-powered web application on Windows. Microsoft's .NET Framework requires the libraries in the .NET Framework and Visual Studio IDE to be installed. I will assume that you have performed both the steps; we will now set up a web application in ASP...