Chapter 8. AJAX Grid

Data grids have always been one of the areas where web applications have had a serious disadvantage compared to desktop programs. The fact that the page needed a full reload when switching between grid pages, or when updating grid details, harmed the application from a usability point of view. Technically, fully reloading the page has bad effects as well, unnecessarily wasting network resources.

But now you know there is a smarter solution to this problem. You can use AJAX to update the grid content without refreshing the page. You can keep your beautiful design in the client browser without even one page blink. Only the table data is refreshed, not the whole page.

The novelty in this chapter is that we’ll use Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) and XML Path Language (XPath) to generate the client output. XSLT and XPath are part of the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) family. XSLT allows defining rules to transform an XML document to another format...