Loading data on demand

Underneath all the hype and trappings, Ajax is just a means of loading data from the server to the web browser, or client, without a visible page refresh. This data can take many forms, and we have many options for what to do with it when it arrives. We'll see this by performing the same basic task in many ways.

We are going to build a page that displays entries from a dictionary, grouped by the starting letter of the dictionary entry. The HTML defining the content area of the page will look like the following code snippet:

<div id="dictionary">
</div>

Yes, really! Our page will have no content to begin with. We are going to use jQuery's various Ajax methods to populate this <div> with dictionary entries.

We're going to need a way to trigger the loading process, so we'll add some links for our event handlers to latch onto, as follows:

<div class="letters">
  <div class="letter" id="letter-a">
    <h3><a href="#">A</a>&lt...