Rob Gonda Rocks AJAX At The New York City ColdFusion User Group

Yesterday, Rob Gonda flew up from Florida to give a presentation on AJAX in ColdFusion applications to the New York City ColdFusion User Group. It was an excellent presentation and one that was particularly useful to me since I am about to start architecting a rather large, AJAX-intensive application. While I have been using AJAX for some time, it has not been very pervasive in my programming. Rob definitely opened my eyes to some cool techniques that I will be exploring shortly.

One thing of particular interest was the technique in which he creates the call back code on the server and then just executes an eval() on it when it returns from the AJAX call. So, for example, if we passed back a value, he wouldn't do the OBJECT.innerHTML = returnValue in the client, he would build that Javascript on the server and then just execute it in the client - something like eval( returnValue ). That way, he keeps all of his logic on the server and keeps the client code extremely simple (relatively speaking). This is something I really want to look into.

I am trying to see if I can get Rob's sample code to post on the nycfug.com website. Stay tuned. And thanks to everyone who came to the meeting last night; the NYCFUG is really taking off and gathering some sweet momentum. Let's keep it going!